My action research topic is "In what ways will early intervention have an
affect on students' success on district benchmarks and state assessments." I
will only be looking at math in grades 3-5. This year we hired several
interventionists in the second semester to get under performing students STAAR
ready. I started looking at the student data and realized that some students did
show improvement on the district assessment after only two weeks of targeted
intervention. I was thrown back. What if we had started closing gaps at the
beginning of the year? I will follow a group of students that were tutored this
year to next year. I will also look at their STAAR results from this year and
right at the beginning about the second or third week of school, interventions
will begin. I can not reach them all. So I was thinking to have two-three groups
a grade level. Another topic I might be considering is looking at our behavior
management on campus. I am not to sure how I would take data. I am still in the
research process for this topic.
I think the teachers will benefit from this because I will be targeting the
student expect ions and objectives that the students are low in. If the students
did not master a readiness TEK on the STAAR that ultimately says the student is
not prepared for the current grade. How will the teacher have time to close the
gap and scaffold the student to the new learning. If we
intervene early the student has more of chance. Building the foundational
knowledge will help with the retention of the new ways the students have to
apply the new student expectations. This year will be a transition year for
grades 3-5 because there will be new TEKS, so now more than ever we have to make
sure that students have a good knowledge base. The new TEKS are more specific. I feel they are asking a lot more from the students. The students will also
benefit from this action research plan. They will be given the tools to succeed
in the new grade.
Furthermore, RTI is a huge deal at our campus. We have LOTS of students on
RTI. If we intervene early we could reduce the numbers of students on RTI.
Looking at the RTI plans I noticed that a lot of students were having problems
with number sense. Fifth graders with number sense problems? This is not a good
thing. If we intervene early the number of students with number sense issues
could decrease. I am hoping that they were be funding next year to start out the
year with more interventionists to help with this research I am doing. I want to
reach more students.
I have 5th graders with number sense problems. I love Math and can "see" it. They are amazed. I honestly think it was the amount of problems I did every evening as a student. I look forward to your intervention you are using. It would be great to have student know how numbers relate as well as their facts.
ReplyDeleteWe implemented trageted tutoring just this past month. It took a while to get it going and it was alot of data digging, but we won't see the results until after the April testings. So, I will have to let you know how it went. I like that you are going to start early in the year. That will be so much more beneficial. We had a new principal and it took him some time to implement this action plan. We shall see...
ReplyDeleteHave you ever heard of "Hands on Equations?" I used this program in an ELL and Special Education Self Contained classroom many years back. It was amazing! The money part can be trimmed down if you can only get enough for one teacher to receive the training then it could still work. I think now on their website there is a TON more flexibility with it than what I had. The website is: http://www.borenson.com/ and they do have free webinars and options to only access partial levels of the curriculum at a time depending on your budget. I had one teacher set and would demonstrate using it. The students used more hand-made pieces.
ReplyDeleteIt is a game, fun, and if you don't know basic operations you will stink at the game. Most kids will learn their operations just so they can play! They don't think of it as hard math.