Results

= __Results, Conclusions, and Implications__ =

Outcomes

Upon graduation from ECU, I thought that I would implement wonderful, inquiry-based strategies daily inside of my classroom. However, in the two short years I have been teaching, I am realizing the enormous amount of material the students are expected to obtain and retain in the extraordinarily short amount of time allotted per semester. This made it very difficult for me to implement inquiry based lessons, while still ensuring that the students were retaining all of the information necessary as far as the content material was concerned.

The use of assessments has significantly improved my ability to implement inquiry in my classroom. Diagnostic assessments are a fantastic tool to gauge student preconceived notions and misconceptions, and adjust content delivery accordingly. I use responsive journaling daily in my class to establish a baseline for learning, and the subsequent discussions can prove what needs to be discussed the most thoroughly during a lesson or unit. Formative assessments are useful in their ability to continually show student's progression during a unit. Formative assessments come in various types, but the one used the most in the Action Research course was concept mapping. I find that concept mapping is very useful to ensure that the students are organizing their information in strategically well planned ways. Sometimes, after an especially vocabulary-heavy lecture, a tree map showing the hierarchical arrangement of the information is just what the students need to reinforce the data learned. Concept mapping can also be a good way to indicate when learning has //not// taken place, as most concept maps have a defined structure and are easy to see on a large scale. Finally, summative assessments are used in almost every content course across a high school curriculum. However most summative assessments are not very well thought out, and are created after the implementation of the unit. In the Action Research course, summative assessments were developed before the unit was presented, giving the teacher a clear focus on where the course was going and forcing me to rethink the truly important concepts in the unit. Additionally, creating the summative assessment at the beginning of the unit gave me specific goals to hit each day. The summative assessments in this study were also unique in their types of questioning. Instead of basic multiple choice questioning, the students were expected to engage in two-tier multiple choice questioning, conceptual questions, and performance items. The different types of questioning allowed students who traditionally do not perform very well on standardized, multiple choice tests to display their understanding in a new and interesting way, which in most cases was more informative (as far as understanding goes) than standard multiple choice tests.

After the action research projects implemented throughout this semester, I have found my students to be more inquisitive and more engaged in science than through a normal semester. The students ask thoughtful, probing questions; instead of "What?" heard so commonly in the classroom, I am now hearing "Why?" While I had used formative and diagnostic assessments in previous semesters similarly to the way they were used this semester during Action Research, I think the most interesting source of data came from student performances on summative assessments. Using test grids to develop assessments, developing assessments before formal presentation, and developing assessments that employed strategies other than simple multiple choice questioning encouraged different types of student learners, improving test scores for many students (especially those who often performed very poorly on standard multiple choice tests).

Inferences for Future Teaching

Because of the action research this semester, I will definitely continue utilizing assessment-based teaching in my classroom. Well thought out, deliberate, standards- and research-based assessments encourage differential learning types, teacher organization, and connections through the science content. Because I had a clear goal in mind, I found that the students were more likely to understand large scientific concepts. The action research lessons have taught my students information that is more likely to be recalled later, instead of forgotten immediately. I think that the understanding of core scienfic concepts has significantly improved based on the assessment-centered instruction, and my understanding of my role as facilitator and instructor has become more focused through this semester.

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