Thursday, 24 January 2008
Getting Started with my Inquiry Project
The central question of my inquiry project is how Scholastic's Reading Counts computerized motivational system affects the reading comprehension of the 106 sixth graders at my school. I started at the beginning of the year by giving all the kids both a reading inventory and an online survey so that I could see how their attitudes and lexile scores change over the course of the year. So far our 6th graders have passed 2, 745 quizzes on books they have checked out of the school library during the first semester.
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6 comments:
Matt Keeley
You've done an excellent job of setting up your TIP. I feel very confident that you'll learn a lot about RC and this information will certainly be important for you and your colleagues. To me, the most interesting questions are those related to the students' experiences while using the software. You've got some survey questions focused on their experiences as well as a video interview at the end. I think the video could prove most interesting of all, especially if they are given the opportunity to really open up. I might recommend that you trim down some of your other data collection if you need more time to get the video data. What do you think? David W.
Matt,
It looks like you have a very thoughtful and thorough plan. Please consider making a timeline to guide you through the whole process. Look forward to your data report.
Gaoming Z.
Hi Matt,
Having been in several schools with AR and Reading Counts, I am really interested in hearing what your kids have to say. Am I correct to assume that English is their second language? Do they read at the same level as a typical American middle school student? Are they motivated to become good English readers?
Amy
In regards to Amy's questions, yes virtually all of my students speak English as their second language. Due to this fact, they don't read at a level equivalent to their American counterparts but this is a generalization, we have 6th graders who function at the beginning reading level and a few that read above grade level. The average kid reads at the 4th grade reading level.
Hey Mat, I miss a London trip with you. How was your week? As you guess I started a huge project, but I am exciting through the process of statistical data coding to find new themes. Maybe I can find a correlation between ER and writing fluency. The following week, I will demonstrate the results of analysis of students’ online essay in three different levels such as the 2nd, 4th, 5th grade and contrasted according two different cases: a) amount of reading books: less than 30 and b) 30 to 60. Please, visit my TIP blog and have fun.
I agree with David that the video interviews will be the most interesting portion of my project. The data collection should be easy though since the management suite that works with RC gathers all the key variables I will be working with and it also exports to Excel. Then, it is a simple matter to create the graphs that I need.
I will follow Gaoming's advice and create a timeline.
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