Technology and Action Research

The technology we use in our classroom includes a Promethean board and graphing calculators. The Promethean is great because I can have the essential ideas I want my students to learn already in a presentation. This allows me to walk around and observe my students instead of constantly having to be writing on the board. Also, because my handwriting isn't the greatest, it is great to be able to have pre-written problems that the students can easily read. We have 20 graphing calculators for our class. Thankfully, enough students have their own calculators that we don't have to share calculators. Most of the time, these calculators are used for simple operations especially when we are learning concepts that don't involve graphing. It is kind of sad the types of things my students put in their calculators because of the things they can't do mentally. However, we would not be able to learn the things we are supposed to learn if we did not have these calculators because the students wouldn't be able to get past simple operations. We have a set of clickers (not enough for one per student) but we have not used them yet. Next semester when I have a smaller class, I hope to use them.

For my action research, I plan to look at how does assessing homework in a variety of ways affect test scores and overall student opinion. So far, I plan to assess homework in the following ways: daily completion grades, daily graded for accuracy, graded for accuracy by chapter, and homework quizzes. I want to know how assessing homework affects study habits and retaining knowledge of mathematical concepts.

Parental Involvement

Parental involvement is pretty mixed for the students in my class. We do have a few overbearing parents that are constantly checking their student’s grades and emailing us about every grade that is not a 100%. The irritating thing about this is that they email us before asking their student about their grade. However, most of the parents do ask what needs to happen to be able to raise their student’s grade, not expecting us to “go easy” on them. The biggest issue is that parents do not seem to keep their children accountable to turn in homework or come to extra help sessions.

For example, we have one student in our class who missed about a week of school for medical-related issues. When she returned, she was constantly falling asleep in class (because of the same medical issue) and was very behind in turning in work and making up tests. We met with her mother and two other academic teachers and an assistant principal. Her mother explained the details of her medical issues which we knew most of. We explained what she needed to do to make up for her missed time, offering many times she could come in for extra help. Her mother promised she would make sure her daughter would come to every time possible (also for her other classes) and would make up all her missing assignments and tests. We only had a week before fall break and she rarely came in for extra help or when she did it was ten minutes before class started. We updated her mother on her behavior and yet there was no change or replied emails. It is kind of frustrating because her mother talked about how much effort they were going to put into her making up everything and we didn’t see any effort besides her coming to a meeting.

Besides these specific parents most of our students’ parents are moderately involved as far as we can tell.