Inquiry Question 5 - Hypothesise and Research

1. Share your findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge. Make sure it is clear what evidence from your inquiry supports each finding.
2. Explain how some of the data you have used to build a profile of the students’ learning will be used as baseline data at the end of the year.

I have spent some time looking at the statistics that are supplied by our senior management every month.  I wanted to analyse where the credits were being entered over the year to see if there was a pattern at all. If students see themselves getting something concrete out of all the effort every day, like credits, then this will give them that feel good push to keep going. 

To start with I looked at the overall credits from last year to see when they were entered into the management system. Blog post here. What is disappointing when I look at these graphs is how long it takes to get the first credits entered, ie get the first set of work completed. This must be hard for the students to keep working on the same stuff each day without seeing any pay off for such a long time.

Because of this, I next wanted to analyse when the first credits were entered over the last few years. 

• Year 11 tracking blog post here
• Year 12 tracking blog post here

This turned out to be quite late in a lot of cases, not many students when it was earlier and in a couple of cases, terrible. It I am working on mindset, then how is this affecting the students?

As my first thoughts about my inquiry were about supporting the students to feel more confident with their project work, I have asked them what they like when they are getting work sent to them from teachers. Blog post here. 

Things of notes from the results

• Students like quite a varied way of receiving their work
• They like a website / workspace to be well ordered and visually appealing
• They like a mix of verbal and written instructions, with examples to look at and refer to
• They appreciate having instructions and examples rewindable so they can look back at them

I have been experimenting with making a more supportive environment on my class  site to see if they noticed and to see if it made any difference. Blog post here. It is good to see that this small change is already making a difference and they did notice when they were there and when they weren't. 

A big part of getting higher grades at NCEA Design and Visual Communication is the quality of the analysis notes. It is no good me building lots of support into my planning for the drawn elements and not putting the same amount of effort into the literacy elements.

I have done an initial exercise with my Year 11 group. Blog post here. We then did the reading on the class site page  - Exercise 2 - and wrote a sentence based on what we had read. 

"I think that _________ would be a good choice for this chair because _______________"

I will use this as my baseline for the class as we are now going to be doing a lot more work on structuring this to be more supportive. I am going to enlist the help of Marc Milford, our literacy specialist again.

MT	Link	AS	Link
HS	Link	UV	Link
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