Action Research: The Plan
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Topic
After completing a test run with ePortfolios this past school year, I noticed that my students were not treating it as a formal writing task. Many did not use proper capitalization or punctuation. This led me to wonder how I can utilize the student's’ ePortfolio sites to leverage formal writing instruction or learning to write for an occasion, purpose, and audience. These are valuable 21st Century Skills that need to be reinforced now to help students succeed in future careers. To help find a solution to help my students, I created a research outline to use as a guide during the collection of information for my literature review.
Purpose
The purpose of my research plan is to implement writing-intervention strategies such as The Digital Writing Workshop (Hicks, 2009) to help my students refine their electronic writing and to teach them to tailor their writing style to the task in front of them. Higher education institutions and future employers will expect them to be knowledgeable writers and hit the ground running. There will not be much time for my students to learn these skills later.
Research Questions
Once I reflected on my learning from my literature review, I was drawn to the following action research question: can the implementation of a "Digital Writing Workshop" enhance the quality of electronic writing in my classroom?
Research Design
I believe a mixed-method of data collection is best suited to my purpose. Effective teaching requires a varied and fluid approach, and ELA methodologies in particular are not always data-driven.
Data Collection
A combination of teacher and student surveys, testing data, and a review of best practices will be the best approach for this topic. I will survey the English teachers on my team to get some insight on their observations in connection with electronic writing. Next, I will survey students during the first week of school to get a feel for their knowledge of writing for a specific purpose and audience. In addition, the students will complete two writing pre-assessments, one handwritten and one electronic. Those samples will be rated and those scores will be the first to go on our writing data bulletin board. Finally, students will complete one major essay per quarter throughout the school year, and those artifacts will be assessed and scores will be added to our board.
Measurement Instruments
The pre-assessment pieces I will score during the first week of school will be rated with the attached checklist. After samples are scored, a writing rubric will be utilized moving forward to assess the students’ major writings over the course of the school year. Those scores will be plugged into a spreadsheet to measure growth (if any) over ten months of instruction.
Since I will be conducting formative assessments throughout each step of the writing process, I will also measure student achievement in connection with tasks such as pre-writing, drafting, revising & editing, and finally publishing (see rubric below). I will maintain another spreadsheet with assessment results for each checkpoint students work through in my Digital Writing Workshop (Hicks, 2009).
Literature Review
The focus of my literature review was to analyze current student-achievement trends in connection with electronic writing, document any possible causes of a decline in performance, and finally to identify strategies for intervention and enhancement to the digital drafting process. It is my goal to use this research to improve my instructional practices along with preparing my 21st-Century learners for what lies ahead. Technology is rapidly expanding globally and satisfactory communication using digital applications is the key to success.
While completing research for my literature review, I ran across a book, The Digital Writing Workshop by Troy Hicks (2009). Mr. Hicks has written about strategies to digitize the familiar Writing Workshop method of teaching the writing process. I plan to have all my students submit two writing samples at the beginning of the year before I introduce The Digital Writing Workshop. I will collect both formative and summative data as we complete various fully-processed papers over the course of the school year. Finally, I will compare the data from the pre-assessment with student performance on subsequent writings.
Sharing Data to Shape Future Learning
After each new learning task is measured and data is entered in my spreadsheet, I will share the results with my students. Each student will be assigned a number to keep their names anonymous, and a scoreboard will be posted on a bulletin board in my classroom, so that students may compare their writing performance to that of others in their class. Once the plan has been implemented for one year, it will be time to share my learning to those outside of my classroom.
I will discuss the results that I gather during the 2017-18 school year with the ELAR team on campus as well as with District leadership. My plan is to eventually present staff development and strategies to help other teachers overcome the writing weaknesses they are seeing as a result of text messaging and instantaneous electronic communication.
Timeline
August 2017
Administer teacher survey at the first English Department meeting.
Administer rhetorical beliefs survey to the students on the first day of school.
Assign and rate one handwritten writing sample and one electronic.
Post results from the pre-assessment in the classroom.
September 2017
Assign and rate the first major writing assessment both formatively and summatively.
Post results in the classroom.
November 2017
Assign and rate the second major writing assessment both formatively and summatively.
Post results in the classroom.
February 2018
Assign and rate the third major writing assessment both formatively and summatively.
Post results in the classroom.
April 2018
Assign and rate the final major writing assessment both formatively and summatively.
Post results in the classroom.
June 2018
Share results with team teachers and administration.
Reflect on the process to identify what worked and what didn't.
Adjust procedures for the 2018-19 school year based on results
References
Carnegie Mellon University. (2008). Writing assessment checklist for beginning of semester writing sample [PDF].
Hicks, T. (2009). The digital writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
IParadigms, LLC. (2012). Common core state standards writing rubrics [Digital image]. Retrieved from http://www.schoolimprovement.com/docs/Common%20Core%20Rubrics_Gr11-12.pdf
Jones, T. (2016, October 15). Kristal Project Edu. Retrieved from http://kristal-project.org/34060-34-gallery-of-yelm-middle-school/writing-prompt-rubric-for-middle-school/
Mertler, C. A. (2017). Action research: Improving schools and empowering educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Neely, M. (2016). Recognizing multiplicity and audience across the disciplines: Developing a questionnaire to assess undergraduates’ rhetorical writing beliefs. The Journal of Writing Assessment, 9(2). Retrieved July 6, 2017, from http://journalofwritingassessment.org/article.php?article=108
Purcell, K., Buchanan, J., & Friedrich, L. (2013, July 15). The impact of digital tools on student writing and how writing is taught in schools. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/07/16/the-impact-of-digital-tools-on-student-writing-and-how-writing-is-taught-in-schools/
