In short: Action Research.
My action research plan will investigate instructional methods used in my classroom to see if students learn more when they navigate a lesson themselves instead of having a teacher lecture. My innovation is to provide students with interactive, self-paced lessons for first time instruction. I would like to see the impact these interactive lessons have on student learning. My fundamental question is “How is student learning affected by the use of interactive lessons for first time instruction vs. teacher delivered lectures for first time instruction?”
I am planning to use quantitative data to answer my question. I plan to use student test scores, relevant applications (projects), and one-on-one, oral questions with students to check for understanding. I will also follow up each learning unit with a survey for students using a Likert scale.
I initially considered comparing student data from this coming school year to student data from two years ago, prior to any use of interactive lessons in my classroom. I decided that might not work well, though, because the learning gaps from the pandemic may affect the outcome. Given that I cannot compare students from two years ago to students next year, I have opted to use a pretest-posttest control group design.
I will start the school year with a pretest for each class to identify which classes of students are most similar in prior knowledge. Then use one class as the control group and the other class as the experimental group to try the interactive lesson delivery. At the end of each unit, I will evaluate the post test data to see the effects of the independent variable (interactive lesson use) on the dependent variable (overall learning).
I have been prepping materials in anticipation of rolling out this study – aggregating interactive lessons from various digital and non-digital sources for three years. The time to prep materials now will be on par with time spent in previous years on planning because much of the groundwork has been done. Now, I just need to bring it all together into cohesive instructional plan. Extra time will be spent to review data, draw conclusions, and publish findings. I plan to engage in these steps at the end of every curriculum unit, then, at the end of the school year, review the yearlong findings to draw more broad conclusions.
I can pilot this study in my classroom with the experiment, and based on my results, run the experiment again in a few more classrooms to check for similar outcomes and draw conclusions. If this experiment, duplicated in other classrooms, shows an increase in student learning it could be rolled out on a larger scale to the whole school or district.
This research is important because it can help understand how students learn best and inform teachers on how best to teach students.
References:
Mertler, C. A. (2020). Action research: improving schools and empowering educators. SAGE Publications, Inc.
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