Action Research Project Area of Focus Brainstorming
I began my brainstorming based on my current education focus, teaching high school math. I also happen to be focusing on Statistics and teaching Statistics this semester, so it is foremost in my mind. One of the reasons I am focusing on that is based on my own children's experiences with their AP Statistics class in high school.
I had one child take AP Statistics do extremely well under a well-seasoned teacher. The next child who took it had a new teacher who had never taught statistics before and she did not do nearly as well. I initially thought the difference was because my older son is naturally much more gifted in math and my daughter is not as gifted, unfortunately. However, I found out that many other students, even those who are good in math, were struggling in my daughter's class. My son also talked to those students and everyone seemed to agree the breakdown was due the new teacher. I am interested in how the teachers' teaching methods differed and if there was a difference in their knowledge of the subject matter. And, how that in turn affected the students' learning.
I have also noticed that most people seem to automatically think statistics is too complicated to understand. In fact, I recall from my own undergraduate days references to our statistics class as the "sadistics" class. Now that I am taking higher level statistics, I see that it is not scary and that it is a very important, prevelant, and relevant part of our everyday lives. I would like to investigate ways to make statistics more accessible and less scary to high school students. I think that there may be two causes for this perception of statistics being too hard to understand: 1) students are scared away by seemingly complex computations and 2) students can't relate to statisics in their everyday life and, therefore, it is too abstract for them to even want to understand.
Based on these thoughts, I came up with the following potential critical questions (and follow up questions) as a starting point:
- How do different levels of teachers' subject knowledge impact their students' understanding?
- If there is an impact, at what point do teachers need additional education on the subject material?
- How do different teaching styles affect students' understanding of material?
- How can statistics be made more accessible to students?
- Is there a relationship between statistics being relevant to students' lives and their understanding or desire to undertand it?
- How can the complex computations of statistics be made more simple to understand?
- Can students teaching other students and each other improve all students' understanding?
Nicely done, Elizabeth. You have some excellent material to work with. For your first question - the levels of a teacher's subject knowledge, I'm not sure how you'd ascertain the level of knowledge. I think I'd probably change that idea to look at the differences between experienced and novice teachers, perhaps? This is a great idea, however, for purposes of classroom action research, I think it is a bit too much and would be really hard to do.
ReplyDeleteThe other questions you raise can really work together and I think they would be much easier to research in a classroom environment. Everything in the last questions you raise hover around instruction and you bring up specifically the idea of peer teaching. I would try to narrow your research into one single instructional strategy such as peer teaching. So, your question could become something like this, for example - Does peer teaching improve student understanding in a high school statistics class? This is what your lit review can help you with.