INTRODUCTIONMy primary objective when I began this project was simple- how can I help my struggling students become proficient readers even faster than ever before so that they will be more prepared for middle school? Through my action research findings, I discovered that many of my students didn't even believe that reaching that milestone was even possible. I also found out that students in intensive intervention require more frequent teacher feedback than average students. How could I use these two critical pieces of new information to help my students improve their literacy skills? The heart of my project of using a student created digital goal setting reading graph began to take shape when I found a digital tool called "Create a Graph". I implemented a growth mindset unit to show students they could do it, then taught them how to graph their reading scores so they could see for themselves exactly where they were. Finally I developed a set of 3 feedback questions that would help students to take actionable steps to reach their next goal.
 GROWTH MINDSET
Here is what you'll find on the links to the right:
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VISUAL GRAPH
EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK
REFERENCES
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VISUAL GRAPH
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My original driving question for my action research was "What impact does students' attitudes and self-perception have on reaching proficient reading levels in intensive intervention for 1+ years?" The infographic I created to the right visually summarizes my major findings from my qualitative and quantitative analysis. I found a strong positive correlation between how students viewed their own reading abilities and their actual reading levels. I was pleased to discover that the majority of my 4th and 5th graders accurately assessed their own levels because I have always made goal setting a priority in my classroom. My "ah-ha" moment came from my both my highest and lowest reader which turned out to be my outliers when analyzing the data. My highest achieving reader thought she "still needed lots of help" while my lowest achieving reader thought he was completely prepared for a core language arts class. How could this be?
As I poured over research articles, I immediately became interested in the work of psychologist Carol Dweck and Australian researcher John Hattie. Carol Dweck's work in the study of growth mindset and brain research inspired me to find out how I could help my students realize that they could indeed "catch the bus". John Hattie's research clearly shows that providing effective feedback to students is one of the Top 10 ways to improve student achievement. Students need evidence of success in achieving mastery or progress toward mastery so how could I help them to visualize their progress in an easy to read format? I wanted students to be able to track their own progress in a meaningful way that would inspire them to motivate themselves to become stronger readers, but what digital tool could best accomplish this goal? To find out more about how I attempted to find answers to helping my struggling readers to grow, please explore the links on any of the images above. |
EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK
I created this infographic using Piktochart. I haven't tried using this tool yet with elementary students, but it was very intuitive! Click on the image above to try it for yourself.
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