I have found that processing my data has been quite a journey! At first I was really overwhelmed with the amount of numbers I had collected but it was interesting to watch it gradually come together. Overall my research was not as successful as I would have liked, but my data did still offer some interesting conclusions about my research topic. As a part of my study I administered a content based pre and post test, which did show improvement over the course of the study. My students also took a pre and post self-assessment survey which addressed their enjoyment of school as well as how capable they perceived themselves to be. This showed no statistical shift. My study also included a daily engagement survey with an open-ended question which asked students to reflect on their engagement and motivation for the day. This showed that student engagement and motivation started high, then decreased towards the middle of the study, and then increased again at the end of the study.
I used a variety of different data because I felt that engagement and its contributing factors was a very complex thing to assess. Obviously I chose the content based pre and post test to represent what my students had learned as a part of the study. The pre and post self-assessment survey was used to measure a shift in the students enjoyment of school as well as how talented their perceived themselves to be. The daily engagement survey was designed to measure how their engagement shifted throughout the study in response to being provided with student choice.
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I have loved this class! While I understand the value in conducting a research project, this class has been the part of a masters program that I have been most excited for. I love being able to discuss all sorts of different teaching beliefs, inspirations, methodologies, and strategies. Because of this class I am more willing to take risks in the classroom, especially regarding technology. To be honest, before this class I didn't really see why using technology is so important in the classroom. Now I understand that not only do we need to teach students how to use technology wisely and responsibly, but that there is a lot out there that can make me a better teacher.
Something I realized in this class that I will take with me forever is that if I want my students to take risks and be willing to fail, then I need to do so as well. I constantly strive to be the best teacher possible, and this has meant that I have hidden my trial and error processes from my students for the sake of saving time, or having smooth classroom management. But this meant that my students never saw me fail, and therefore felt uncomfortable failing themselves. By showing my students how I figure things out through trial and error, or practice, I can model for them the learning I want them to engage in. I have a tough class this year in terms of academic level, focus, and motivation. I am excited to see how my research on engagement strategies will come together, and I am excited to learn more about how to make school and learning more meaningful for my students. Not going to lie, I have had a tough time finding research that I felt was relevant and adequate, but I am excited about the three new research articles I found this week. The first is called Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation Orientations in the Classroom: Age Differences and Academic Correlates. In this paper researchers found that intrinsic motivation is highest in third graders and then decreases steadily to eighth graders. They also found that intrinsic motivation correlates with academic success. This is great for my research because it shows that students my age are more likely to benefit from activities which are intrinsically motivating, such as providing them with more meaningful opportunities to make choices. The second article I found this week is called Enhancing Students' Engagement by Increasing Teachers' Autonomy Support. The researchers in this article found that when teachers moved from being controlling to supporting student autonomy, student engagement greatly increased. This means that allowing students to feel more autonomous and that they have control over their learning increases their engagement. Again this is great news for my research because student choice is an autonomy-support strategy, Finally, the last article I found this week is called Effect of Choice on Cognitive and Affective Engagement. In this article the researchers studied if providing students with a choice of assignment increased their effective engagement, relating to how successful they were in learning the material, and their affective engagement, relating to how much they enjoyed completing the assignments. They found, surprisingly that student choice has no effect on effective engagement, but had a positive effect on affective engagement. This meant that students enjoyed completing the assignment more when they were given a choice, but they did not learn the material better. This is surprising because many other studies have found affective and effective engagement being highly correlated. I believe that the reason the researchers got these results is because they were not providing students with a meaningful choice. Self-determination theory states that people work harder for something that is meaningful to them. I think that when providing students with choice in the classroom, it is important that we provide them with a meaningful choice.
The four videos for today all stressed the growing importance of fostering creativity. John Sealy Brown pointed out that our world is changing at an exponential pace. This means that teaching students skills can't possible prepare them for the future, because new skills are constantly being created. In order to prepare our students for the future, we need to foster a creative spirit in them. Howard Gardner expanded on this idea pointing out that every person has multiple intelligences. Every person has something to offer, and has an intelligence that can be fostered. From Ken Robinson and Daniel Pink I learned how to begin to think about fostering creativity in my own classroom. I need to allow time and a secure environment to let my students be creative. To choose to learn about what interests them and to feel unbound by can't or don'ts.
In terms of my own teaching context, I have found it hard to implement opportunities for creativity in the classroom. I think I need to be creative in thinking of providing small opportunities for creativity throughout the day. Working at a Title 1 school means that the days are pretty regimented and most of our time is devoted to, Ken Robinson would be mad, Language Arts and Math. I hope that my research about providing students with more opportunities to choose what they study in a way is giving them space to be creative. A main point I took away from the content this week is that allowing children to be themselves is highly correlated with their creativity. I can encourage my students to be themselves every day and try to embrace that side of creativity as well. I think that one of the best ways to implement Mobley's 6 keys to creativity is through Problem/Project Based Learning. Working in groups on a project is a non-linear form of learning. It is an environment where learning is a process and being wrong is a necessary part of that process. It also gives students the opportunity to be around, and working with, their other creative classmates. When students are working together to solve a problem they turn the impossible to possible and are encouraged to think of creative solutions. I hope to use this teaching strategy soon! Both of these instructional models are new, and not new at the same time. I was talking to some friends of mine about education and we decided that no matter how you dress it up or rename it, there are some teaching practices which are just good teaching practices. "Flipping" your classroom refers to a teaching model where students learn content at home from online vides, which allows class time to be devoted to projects and answering questions. This is beneficial to students because it allows for more individualized instruction which is more meaningful to each student. This leads to students being more engaged and embracing new technology. The "Pre-Training Flip" especially spoke to me in terms of applicability to my classroom because it moves the instructional videos to a schema building role. This works better for my teaching context because few of my students have computers with internet in their homes. I would, however, like to introduce more instructional videos into my class time to serve as front loading resources. The Challenge Based Learning instructional model groups students and presents them with real life challenges to solve. This allows students to be creative and demonstrate their curiosity in a way that actually has real world value. I was excited to hear about this instructional model because I can apply it in a way to my research project. My project involves allowing students to choose their own topics for short research reports. I could easily shift the assignment to allowing students to choose a problem to solve related to the content I am teaching at the time. I think this would increase their engagement to the content because it would give them a tangible reason for learning it.
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AuthorI am a fourth grade teacher in Vacaville, California. Archives
November 2017
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