Academic Research

Share three pieces of academic or professional reading and explain how they and other sources helped you form hypotheses about aspects of teaching that might contribute to current patterns of learning. 

In order to form a deeper understanding of my overall inquiry I have located some academic and professional reading to help with my forming of a hypothesis. Along with these readings I have also been lucky enough to have extended discussions with my colleagues which has lead me to my hypothesis and my next steps and what I should implement. Below I have outlined some of the readings that I have looked at in order to strengthen my hypothesis. 

One piece of research I looked at was "Reading to Learn from the Start" by Tanya S. Wright. In this article it outlined "Successful and engaged readers comprehend, learn from and enjoy what they read." Wright outlined the importance of background knowledge and vocabulary. This article discussed how this is possible through read alouds which I will break down in a bit more detail below. The article suggests that interactive read alouds enhance extra-textual talk (talking around the text) can allow student to learn about and understand key concepts around text features. These read alouds share critical learning about the world as students learn related knowledge through explanations from the teacher. Another key aspect was vocabulary knowledge and how students are able to understand and remember vocabulary better when it is read aloud and explained in detail by the teacher. 

My take aways from this article are that reading aloud is important at any age even with our students in year 5 and it is a valuable part of teaching. My class still love to listening to picture books so I will try and make sure that I incorporate topic specific picture books with the class in order to enrich vocabulary. I will include my spelling words for the week to relate to the texts that my students are reading so that they are exposed to this in a number of different ways.  

Another piece of research I looked at was "The influence of student engagement on the effects of inferential reading comprehension intervention for struggling middle school readers" by Amanda Martinez-Lincoln, Marcia A. Barnes and Nathan H. Clemens. This research discusses the move from elementary school to middle school and how reading comprehension becomes central to academic achievement. This research suggests that in order to excel in middle school reading there are many factors that need to be taken into account including: "attention and working memory, motivations and skills and knowledge including word reading, vocabulary, word knowledge, inference making and comprehension monitoring" (Martinez-Lincoln, Barnes & Clemens 2021). Research suggests that readers who are struggling tent to show difficulty in one or more areas. This research also describes interventions that can have an impact on chaining reading achievement. 

My take aways from this article reinforce the importance of vocabulary in being able to read and understand more complex texts. This has added extra value to the previous reading that I have done around the importance of vocabulary. So this is why I will change the focus of our spelling words to be around to the words we are coming across in the text and exposing the students to topic specific language and vocabulary through the overall research presentations will be important. 

Another key focus of my inquiry this year is student wellbeing and the links this has to student achievement. I chose to use a New Zealand report to look at focusing on the first part of the report. This report was called "Learning in a Covid-19 World: The Impact of Covid-19 on Schools." Part one discusses wellbeing and achievement as was titled "Part 1: The impact on student wellbeing, engagement and learning." The report suggests that wellbeing and achievement are linked to each other and with the last few years of school it is really important to see these two linked. I really learnt a lot from this report it also made me feel much better not just focusing on a subject area but an area of student well being. This links in really well with Mitey: Sir John Kirwan Foundation that we are looking at at school this year. 

This and other research and articles I have read have helped in shaping my next steps and what I will implement into the classroom. It was really great to see that some of the things I am doing will help make the changes that I wish to see, so I will continue on with these implementations with a little bit of tweaking along the way. 

References: 

Goldstein, H., Ziolkowski, R. A., Bojczyk, K. E., Marty, A., Schneider, N., Harpring, J., & Haring, C. D. (2017). Academic vocabulary learning in first through third grade in low-income schools: Effects of automated supplemental instruction. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60(11), 3237-3258.

ERO (Education Review Office) (January 2021) Learning in a Covid-19 World: The Impact of Covid-19 on Schools. Retrieved on 25 May 2022 from https://ero.govt.nz/our-research/learning-in-a-covid-19-world-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-schools.

Kuhn, K. E., Rausch, C. M., McCarty, T. G., Montgomery, S. E., & Rule, A. C. (2017). Utilizing nonfiction texts to enhance reading comprehension and vocabulary in primary grades. Early Childhood Education Journal, 45(2), 285-296.

Lai, M. K., McNaughton, S., Amituanai‐Toloa, M., Turner, R., & Hsiao, S. (2009). Sustained acceleration of achievement in reading comprehension: The New Zealand experience. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(1), 30-56.

Wright, T. S. (2019). Reading to learn from the start: The power of interactive read-alouds. American Educator, 42(4), 4.

Zhou, N., & Yadav, A. (2017). Effects of multimedia story reading and questioning on preschoolers’ vocabulary learning, story comprehension and reading engagement. Educational Technology Research and Development, 65(6), 1523-1545.

Baseline Data

I have been thinking about my baseline data and how I will measure progress in my inquiry this year. I have decided that the best way to see if my implementation will lead to change will be to base this on my beginning of the year reading data, student confidence in reading, student enjoyment and engagement as well as my well being data that I collected at the beginning of the year. I will outline this data is greater detail in the post below.

In order to have baseline data I needed to select my target students. Below are my target students showing beginning of the year reading age with a comparison of their actual age. I do have three other students that are on the cusp of this group as well who are reading at level 25 that I will include in the data as well. 

As you can see from this data set my target students are just below where they need to be for their age. Looking at this data at the beginning of the year was why I chose this as my inquiry focus. They are only just below where they need to be at the moment but if they stay at these levels they will fall further behind when they enter year 6. 

My hunches again are around vocabulary and seeing how this can have an impact as well as comprehension specifically looking at inferring. I will add graphs to this data at a later date when I am looking at comparisons for now this is the raw data from the start of the year which I will use as a baseline for my end of year data. 

What is my hypothesis?

As I have been reflecting over the holidays and during my planning for learning for term 2 I have been thinking about some of the reasons as to why my learners are still reading between 7.5 and 8.5 years in year 5. I have some hunches as to why this might be which has given me a clearer idea of my hypothesis. Below I will discuss some of the key hunches/hypothesis that I have been contemplating. 

Confidence
Students confidence in reading is something that immediately stood out with these learners. I have wondered if this has to do with mask wearing and being able to hear and understand the children but this term with masks off the lack of confidence is still evident in reading. It it the confidence of being able to share their reading with others as well as answering questions. What I have noticed is many of my students will answer a question but they are not confident in their answers. They will answer the questions but will show a real hesitation in sharing the answers along with hesitation that they might be wrong.

Missing School
A big part of term 1 was lots of absences across these learners due to being sick or isolating. I think that this has had a large impact on my students as trying to come back to norms and routines after an extended period of time can be a challenge. Not only with student wellbeing but also the social aspect as well. I find that many of my students in my target group will either be away for the beginning of the week and our first reading or will be away at the end of the week and miss the follow up text that goes along with the topic. So this also could be a reason for these students reading at this age. 

Inferencing gaps
When I has interviewing for my CoL position last year one of the key things that I discussed as my hunch was the gaps in being able to inference. I have noticed with my target group that they are able to use the text to answer literal comprehension questions but struggle to read between the lines and answer questions that are not directly stated in the text. This is an area that I will focus on with this target group moving forward. 

Learning to read change to reading to learn
The biggest change with this group of learners is moving from learning to read to using reading to learn. The questions they are needing to answer are focused more on applied knowledge, inferring and vocabulary related questions. 

These are some of the wonderings I have had throughout looking at my inquiry so far and are some areas that I will continue to look into along with looking at further readings related to some of these hypothesis. 

Clearer Direction

We had our first face to face PLG for the year last week. It was really nice to connect with people in person! I really enjoyed our PLG as we were able to break off into groups and discuss our inquiries and what we have been working on or thinking about. There were some really great discussions and ideas that were given by others in the group which has given me a clearer direction with my inquiry. 

This year I have been focusing on having my students write more frequently with having picture prompts each day. This has however still be relatively seperate from my reading program. After some great discussions and suggestions from other CoL teachers and leaders I have started to consider making reading and writing intertwined rather than being two separate subjects.

What will this look like?

At the moment for reading I have an overall topic each week where the students have the opportunity to find our facts and research a topic in detail. I then try and best as I can to link the journal articles to this topic for the week. The topic is generally related to our term topic as a school focusing on key aspects of the topic each week. Doing this allows the students to have more exposure to key vocabulary and ideas from each topic. What I would like to try and do for the rest of the term is incorporate this overall reading focus into our writing as well. 

From this week I have changed the spelling words from being completely subject specific to words that are related to the topic but also found in our journal articles as well. I have gone from 3 to 4 writing groups and these are connected to my reading groups. So having the same groups for reading and writing. This means that in my literacy rotations I can see these groups for guided reading or writing throughout the week and also intertwine these lessons. 

The overall task for writing each week I will try and make it relate to the overall topic. For example at the moment I am looking at compass bearing and directions so will have the writing task related to writing out instructions. I will then continue on with a writing prompt each week which will again relate to the overall topic and give the student the opportunity to use the new vocabulary they have been exposed to from reading and spelling into their writing. I am hoping that this will overall lead to a more in depth understanding of a topic. 

This is where I am at with my inquiry this stage. It has been very valuable discussing my inquiry with other CoL teachers and leaders to get a clearer understanding of all my thoughts as well as a clearer direction of my next steps.

Preliminary Findings: Student Wellbeing and Student Voice Surveys

Due to what has been happening this term with lots of children in and out of school due to sickness and other reasons my biggest focus was students wellbeing. Reading is my overall inquiry focus but in order to figure out my next steps there I wanted to ensure that my students wellbeing was being looked at and addressed. Wellbeing is so important and I believe that this needs to be understood before any learning can take place. If a child has low wellbeing how do we expect them to learn in the classroom with so much going on in their own worlds.

Building relationships with my students this year has been a challenge due to the number of ins and outs there have been. So i conducted some wellbeing surveys so that I could have a clearer understanding of my students well being and what they needed from me as their teacher to help school and learning to be enjoyable and not something that they dread each day. I conducted two surveys that I adapted from other surveys I had found online to fit with my students and also the types of data that I was looking for. Below I have summarised some of the key data I found from these surveys. 

Student Wellbeing Survey Results 

The first graph shows how the students feel overall at school. As you can see from the graph 15 of my students strongly agree with this statement where I also have a number of students who somewhat disagree or strongly disagree. This has given me a great indication of how my students feel coming to school along with an area that I need to investigate why these students don't feel happy at school. My hunch is that there is a slight fear of being at school with covid in our community however this is something to investigate further. 

Another statement in this survey was teachers are there to help me. This graph shows that the majority of students strongly agree with this statement with a small portion who somewhat disagree. Most of the data indicates that students feel like teachers are at school to help them learn, I kept this broad as I wanted students to not feel like they had to base in on the current classroom teacher. Again this data has shown an area to investigate further and see what I can do more as a teacher to ensure that all of my students feel that they can come to a teacher for help. 

Another key statement in this survey was school is mostly fun. I thought that this is an important question for students to be able to answer as it would gauge how the students feel coming to school and if they are having fun at school. This is a big aim for us at Pt England to make sure that children are coming back to school and also having fun at the same time. Again from this data I can see that most of the students agree to some extent with only a small number disagreeing with this statement. We have been trying to incorporate a lot more fun days and activities so far this year so looks like this could definitely be something to continue on with. 

Student voice survey results

Another survey that I conducted with my class was to find out student voice and see how they felt in the classroom with their peer, learning and teachers. Below are some of the key results I found out along with a brief discussion. 

This question was I feel safe in the class sharing my ideas, the data shows that some to most of the time the students do feel that that can share with some feeling like they don't often or hardly ever feel safe to share ideas. This is an important area as I would like all of the students to feel safe to share thoughts and ideas with each other. This links to confidence as well which I do hope to see increase over the year. 

This question was I know what to do when I have a problem, the majority of the class at least some of the time know what to do when they have a problem with a small portion not really sure. This again is another important work on as students should know what to do when they have a problem and should know how to seek help when needed.

This next question was similar to the previous survey but I related this one to how students feel about their teacher. This one was phrased as I feel like my teacher knows me. The data shows that all of the students at least some of the time feel like the teacher knows about them and their lives. I think this is really important if we are wanting students to succeed they need to know that their teacher is also there to support them. 

Finally the last question of significance in this survey was linked to learning and if students did know what they were actually learning about. From the data I can see that this is an area that needs continued development. 

From both of these surveys I managed to gain a greater insight to my class and see some areas of strength as well as some areas that require development throughout the year. I think having wellbeing and student achievement and engagement linked will have a huge impact on not only student achievement but also about how they feel about coming to school. These are just some of the questions not all by all means but just a snapshot into the class to begin the year.