Saturday, September 28, 2013

EDLD 5326 - Update on my action research project

Action Research Project Title:  Student Readiness vs. Student Success

Blog URL: http://coachhurst.blogspot.com/

Number of AR Project Documented Hours: About 50

AR Project Summary (at least 250 words):

My action research project is looking at the high school freshmen who were promoted from the eighth grade even though they failed one or more STAAR tests.  These students would not have been promoted under the SSI (Student Success Initiative) with the old form of state testing (TAKS).  Out of nearly 700 freshmen who were on campus this status applies to 74 (non-modified) students, and they are the focus of my research.

Under the old TAKS system these students would not have been promoted to high school without a unanimous vote form all of their teachers and counselors.  With the new state system of assessment STAAR not having such a protocol, I wanted to follow these students and see if they could be successful in high school despite not achieving on the test. 

After pulling all testing data and determining which students would be part of the research, all grade data was compiled for the full freshmen year of these students.  And all core subject teachers were then given a survey to help determine if the students were, in their opinion, actually academically ready and just didn’t have appropriate study habits or if they in fact had large gaps that needed to be addressed.

Currently all data is being processed to determine how successful these 74 students were, and unfortunately this step is taking a little longer than was expected as the system needed to pull grades was updated over the summer and I lost all of that time to work.  The next step will then be to pull the freshmen year STAAR test scores for these kids and see if there was an increase in performance or if there are still struggles.

I feel that the project is moving along nicely for the most part, and am in hopes that we will get some great insight into how good an indicator of student performance these high stakes standardized tests are. 

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