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The materials used for this project consisted of a variety of paper and many pencils. The vocabulary words originated from the reading the students did in class. The class with mostly ninth and tenth graders (class A) read The Contender by Robert Lipsyte; the class with only one tenth grader (class B) read Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Class A completed reading The Contender before the culmination of the project; therefore they began reading Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Class B completed Lord of the Flies just at the end of the project’s timeline. Some of the other materials included dictionaries, colored pencils, markers, construction paper, lined and unlined paper, an overhead projector, overhead transparencies, and the classroom board. For the pretreatment baseline scores, five past MCAS open response excerpts and their accompanying prompts were administered. Two during-treatment past open response excerpts and their prompts were administered and one past open response excerpt and its prompt was given as a posttest or post-treatment indicator. The titles of the excerpts and their accompanying prompts may be accessed through the appendix. |
| Beliefs Driving Instruction |
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•Learning
should take place in an atmosphere conducive to taking risks.
Students should feel comfortable adding their thoughts and
insights to a discussion, whether it is a large group or small
cohesive group format.
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Brock, C. H. (1997); Brozo, w. G. (2000); Keene, E. O. (2002) |
Learning and the Learner |
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Teacher's Role |
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Students need to be guided and challenged by teachers to interpret oral and written texts from a variety of genres. Teachers need to maintain a balance for both reading and writing textual information. Literary models and reading experiences improve students’ writing but direct instruction is still necessary to help students become better writers and readers. Skillfully merging direct reading and writing instruction can provide these experiences more efficiently and make time on learning more worthwhile.
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Langer, J. A. & Flihan, S. (2000); McTighe J., Seif, E., & Wiggins, G. (2004); Wood, K. D. (2002) |
•Writing
should be included in every part of the curriculum. Writing
across the curriculum should also include both transactional or
high stakes writing and expressive or low stakes writing.
Students and teachers communicating through the reading and
writing process engage in authentic dialogic exchanges where
meaning is made through a socio-psycholinguistic transaction.
Discussing students’ writing assignments presents to the
students a chance to witness how valuable their writing is to
both the teacher and to the daily life of the class.
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Cunningham, P. M. & Allington, R. L. (2003); Hefflin, B. R. & Hartman, D. K. (2002); Martinez, M. & Roser, N. L. (2003); Vacca, R. T. & Vacca, J. L. (2000)
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Curriculum |
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Assessment |
•It
is essential that students are assessed on their knowledge of
the grade level English Language Arts frameworks. All involved
with their education need to know how far they have come, where
they are, and how far they need to go. While an educational
evaluation should show where students are functioning in the
frameworks, assessments should not be a life altering experience
but a demonstration of the strengths and weaknesses of the
curriculum so educators can make improvements.
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Hoffman, J. V., Paris, S., Salas, R., Patterson, E., and Assaf, L. (2003); Juel, C. & Minden-Cupp, C. (2004); Laturnau, J. (2003); Taylor, B. M., Pearson, P. D., Peterson, D. S., & Rodriguez, M. C. (2005)
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Student
Progress This research project is a single subject research design that followed three students individually through the intervention process. Each student's performance and progress will be discussed separately. C C progressed throughout the duration of the intervention. While she understood that the MCAS practice examinations were important she was dismayed at having to do them. Part of her conversation with me included the words, “Not another one” and “Does it count?” In spite of the initial resistance, she did perform the best she could on the prompt. When she took her final prompt she was not having one of her best days overall. She did understand the importance of doing well and again tried the best she could. This researcher felt that the score was authentic for her capabilities. C’s first attempts at producing analytical responses were scattered as shown by the observation checklist of criteria from the five pre-treatment responses. The range for the number of sentences she wrote is from one to seven. Her during treatment checklist data revealed that the second prompt was more productive that her first, with a range of three to eleven sentences, yielding a difference of eight. For C’s final product she wrote ten sentences. This is a gain of 6.6 sentences from the mean of the original five pre-test scores. A sample of one of her during treatment writings is provided as well as her posttest writing. |
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A A also made progress throughout the intervention process. At the beginning of the school year she was quite resistant to performing any writing task and did not understand why she had to begin practicing for the MCAS examinations so early in the school year. She initially struggled with the comprehension the MCAS excerpts and did not answer the very first one presented to her. She told this teacher/researcher that she did not understand the excerpt or the question. She made more of an attempt on subsequent prompts, but told this educator/researcher, “I just can’t write any more.” An observation checklist of criteria for the five pre-treatment MCAS responses is provided. A first began making connections with reading material after intervention started with the reflective prompts that related to the novel being read in class. She also had to get past writing phrases instead of sentences for her vocabulary words. She worked diligently to improve her sentence structure and add context clues. Her first during treatment writing is provided as an indication of her upward performance on not only the open response prompts but her writing in general. Her posttest is also provided as an indicator of her improved performance. |
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E E made gains as well during the school year. In the beginning he, too, wrestled with the writing process and was reluctant to write anything. Most of his verbal feedback centered around words such as, “Do I have to do this,” “I don’t understand what this says or what I am suppose to write, and “Does this count?” As indicated by the observational checklist, E was unable to answer the first MCAS prompt presented to him. He did make more of an effort on the prompts that followed. E began showing signs of improvement towards the end of November with the first during treatment MCAS excerpt and prompt. He also had to work on sentence structure and context clues as opposed to using phrases and random punctuation. E continued struggling with the language of the question as well as some of the language within the excerpts. He did, however, begin to write more without exhibiting some of the earlier signs of resistance. E’s posttest was his best and is provided as a mark of his improvement. |
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