Process Log 3/21 - 3/25
Goals from Last Week: I accomplished all of my goals from the last week before spring break by successfully implementing my product and editing my research essay. While there are definitely more things to be fixed in the essay, I am almost finished.
Mentor: This Monday I had a mentor meeting with Mrs. Crockom to talk about how my product implementation went the same day. We discussed how easily the students were able to understand the activities and answer the pre and post assessment questions. After talking with her I have made some small edits to the activities and questions that the students seemed to have the most trouble with and have discarded one of the questions on the assessments as there were issues with getting accurate responses. The question I took out was a rating scale to see if the students themselves believed that they were better prepared after the presentation to handle a poisoning. The issue with this question was that the majority of the students answered a 10 out of 10 preparedness before the lesson, even though they got most of the questions based on the learning objectives wrong. They then answered 10 again for the post-assessment so no change or improvement was registered. Therefore I decided to remove the question from consideration and go based on the students' average score on the assessment alone.
Research/Product: This Monday I spent the day at Travis Elementary school with some of the first grade classes as they worked through the activities I designed. First I handed out a pre-assessment and after all the activities were done I gave them a post-assessment with the same questions. As soon as I got home I graded these assessments and after and hour or two of struggling through missing vowels and backwards letters (adorable) I had the majority of the results in excel. The average for the pre-assessment was 21% and the average for the post-assessment was a 63%. These results did show a marked increase in the students ability to answer questions based on the learning objectives that the activities were based on which proves that the activities were effective in increasing the students' knowledge on poison safety. One issue I had however with implementation was that the majority of the classes I visited were GT and only one was normal. The normal class had especial difficulty focusing and remembering the information and had consistantly lower scores. I discussed this with my mentor and she suggested that I first calculate them seperately to see if the difference between the first and second average scores was the same as in the GT classes. If it was, the product was equally effective for them and they could be included in the results, if not, I may have to add in other activities focused on them and redo that class.
Goals for Next week: My goals for next week are to finish compiling my results and determine if I need to try again with the non-GT classes. I also want to make good progress on my final presentation and start to include more product information.