Action Research Outline

GOAL: To determine if student achievement in Reading and Mathematics improves with the use of the SuccessMaker program with the Reading and Mathematics intervention students.

Outcomes:
1. The SuccessMaker program will be identified as successful, unsuccessful, or provides no significant change in achievement with the intervention students at the campus.

Activities:
1. Monitor the student’s progress weekly from the Initial Placement (IP) throughout the use of the SuccessMaker program to determine if there is growth, stagnation, or no improvement in the students’ achievement.
2. Use the nine week benchmark data and other assessments to determine if there is growth, stagnation, or no improvement in the students’ achievement.
Resources/Research Tools Needed:
1. The intervention student data in the SuccessMaker program.
2. The intervention students’ data on benchmarks and other assessments.
3. The intervention students’ standardized achievement test scores.

Timeline:
1. Identify the intervention students – August/September/October 2010
2. Begin the use of the SuccessMaker program – August/September/October 2010
3. Collect baseline data to use to determine progress – August/September/October 2010
4. Weekly monitoring of the intervention students progress on the SuccessMaker program – August 2010 – May 2011
5. Create a data collection spreadsheet to monitor the progress of the intervention students – August 2010

Benchmark/Assessments:
1. Collect data through the SuccessMaker program
2. Nine week benchmark exams
3. Practice TAKS scores

Revisions to SIP/PIP based on monitoring and assessments:
1. Teacher intervention tutorials may be implemented.
2. Teachers may assist the students with the SuccessMaker program if the students are struggling with improvement.

The text that I am reading identified nine areas from which you can find your action research question: "staff development, curriculum development, individual teacher(s), individual student(s), school culture/community, leadership, management, school performance, and social justice" (Dana, 2009). With each of these categories there are many things that could be researched and that are interesting ranging from: what could be done to increase teacher leaders to how to improve one group of students lack of achievement to what is the best way to transition the students from one grade level to the next.
The significance of action research is to look into the future to determine who will be better off as a result of this action research and how the will be impacted. After choosing an action research topic there may be branches of other questions that are identified as a result of the the initial inquiry, but it is important to stay focused on the initial topic and maybe add the new research questions to a future to do list.
The more that I read this week and the more videos that I watched from the Lamar scholars about action research the more I learned that it is important to inquire about something that is of interest to the inquirer. When research is completed about something that you are interested in the research is more important to the researcher.
Dana, N. F. (2009). Leading with passion and knowledge: The principal as action researcher. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Action research is researching by questioning, re-questioning, analyzing, planning, reflecting, and implementing with an end result of change for improvement. One of the important things about action research is that the person completing the research is not an outsider from a university or a research firm. The research is actually completed by the person who is aware of the need for a change at their organization. Action research is important to use to make changes specific to the need of the environment. Leaders, administrators, doctors, or teachers could use action research because it is inquiring, searching for answers, and gaining knowledge about the desired subject along the way.
I could use action research in so many ways to change things. As a teacher I could use action research to determine how I could better reach parents to involve them with activities at school. Action research could also be used to determine how to get the ESL students to use the spoken English language more frequently so that they are able to practice the English language to improve at it. Another way that action research could be used as a teacher is by inquiring how I could make the learning of reading and mathematics more hands-on so that the students are more interested in learning these subjects.