Previous Experience with Action Research
In my undergraduate experience at Baylor, we did action research my senior year. I posed the question “How does awareness of meaning and purpose in the 5th grade mathematics classroom affect student grades?”. I created an activity where students made a timeline of their lives including past accomplishments, big hopes and dreams, and ultimate goals. Then I created a student survey. I basically saw that students who indicate specific future goals regarding higher education/ future jobs on their timelines and according to a survey, students whose parents regularly (at least 1 time per week) discussed why they needed math for their future (college, job, life, etc), had higher grades in math class than those who didn’t. I worked on implementing lots of discussions about future goals and unfortunately with STAAR testing, did not collect data at the end of the year since it was crunch time. Regardless, ever since then I have felt encouraged to support students in thinking through regular discussion of talents, skills, jobs, and dreams in connection to math.
The planning stage is always the most challenging of any stages of Action Research. I’ve even noticed that planning for my classes is always the hardest part of teaching.
New Topic
I am concerned because I am starting to find that I am not the biggest fan of stand-alone blended learning (my innovation plan) in the math classroom. Initially when we were choosing topics, my professor encouraged me to go the blended learning route and implement the reflective process I appreciated in ePortfolios as an aspect / possible station in blended learning.
After attempting to implement some blended learning in the classroom last year, I have my 6th graders from last year looping with me in 7th grade math. My administration was hesitant to support me in implementing blended learning, even though I wanted to do the station-rotation model, because students in the middle school struggle to self-monitor, stay motivated during online activites, and retain the knowledge without conceptual understanding. I know that in order to make blended learning innovative, it needs to be self-paced. However, I don’t think that students truly are developing a deep understanding of math while in the blended learning setting I created, instead, they were learning to mimic the processes.
After a 7-week summer, my students have forgotten so much and it appears that they truly did not understand the conceptualized content due to only learning how to mimic the process which tends to happen in math that students learn from videos/ virtually. Instead, it would be helpful if I created opportunities for students to experience math through interesting and engaging problems while working on a vertical surface in randomized groups.
At the beginning of this school year, when we did activities regarding conceptual understanding of what we previously learned, it was as if it was all brand new to these students. It’s wild because we just took a final at the end of June and at the very beginning of August, when we returned, their “knowledge”over this material they’ve been learning since 5th grade was gone. The craziest part is that I taught them!! And I thought I taught them really well. I think I need to work on creating the perfect balance between blended learning and allowing for collaboration and student thinking in the math classroom.
I recently discovered the book “Building Thinking Classrooms” by Peter Liljedahl and have started to implement some of those practices.
As a result, I think I want to make my question:
How does the implementation of use of randomized groups writing on vertical surfaces to solve introductory math problems over new content affect student conceptual understanding, and in turn, their test grades?
I know what the book says, but I would love to document it first hand to make it more believable to those around me. I also think in doing the action research, I will be more encouraged to keep reflecting and processing, and modifying what is going on in my classroom.
References:
Mertler, C. A. (2019). Action research: Improving schools and empowering educators (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. https://edge.sagepub.com/mertler6e1/student-resources/chapter-1/video-resources, video 1.1 & 1.2
Education with Meaning 