Planned Outcomes

Individual and Group Objectives

     The reason teachers convert to researchers is to help students increase their knowledge and/or ability regarding their education. Teachers attempt various strategies, also known as best practices, to facilitate their students learning. This current research project is about just that, facilitating students’ learning by teaching strategies to improve writing performances, particularly as they relate to high stakes testing. All three students selected for this project struggle with not only the writing process, but also with understanding the material presented on the MCAS tests. None of the students received a passing score on any of the five preliminary assessments, regardless of the length of the paragraph they attempted to write. This is suggestive of the students’ inability to decipher the text and comprehend the prompt. For the students to receive a passing score of two or better, they will need to respond more closely to what the prompt is asking them to write. Even though the number of sentences presented in some of the responses would be considered acceptable, the information the students produced did not support the writing prompt for the excerpt.

     After analyzing each student’s data separately, this educator/researcher will reinforce various strategies from the research project. One strategy will be to increase the length of each paragraph to a minimum of seven to ten on-topic sentences. Another strategy will include facilitating the understanding of the text and the prompt. The students need to grasp what the content of the excerpts are discussing as well as what the prompt is instructing them to write. While single versus multi-syllabic words are an issue, this educator/researcher is more concerned about the students producing the correct vocabulary that will answer the prompt. Giving students appropriate level vocabulary as well as having them develop their own repertoire of words, during this on-going research project, will be of more assistance than trying to reinforce confusing multi-syllabic words. One final strategy will be to help the students create appropriate sentence length and focus. They need to understand the difference between sentences that do not give enough information and sentence that give too much information or wander off-topic.