Phase II - Next Steps
Phase two offered insights into my classroom.
- The rigor of the activities students engaged in the second phase was higher compared with phase one. When students are asked to create and defend their answer, the perceived challenge level was 12% higher than phase one.
- Student choice is very important to students. Their choice in the style of how they would like to learn math shows that some like a more traditional approach, while others like a more hands on approach. If there were to be a third phase of this action research some modifications that I would make would be to randomly select students for the two groups. In each phase, there were only a small number of students in the project-based group, 7 and 15, respectively. I would want a more evenly numbered sample size for each group.
- Do a longer study that could stretch to a semester or possibly a year. I could team up with the other ninth grade teacher, who teaches primarily with problems and lecture, and see what would happen if our randomly chosen classes were given the same assessment at semester or year end. Students in my class could learn only through project-based learning and her class through problems and lecture. These modifications would be interesting to implement.