David Vega's List: AssessmentPractices

• Teachers engaged in the practice of action research are, by nature, reflective practitioners who go beyond reflection to action. Customary praxis reserves this practice until the data are culminating and summative in nature. This action research model encourages ongoing reflection and action through progress monitoring, lesson revision, and post-assessment during the teaching and learning, not afterward. The sharing of final reflections and conclusions between and among colleagues is encouraged.
• The need for meaningful reflective practice is clear. Teachers need to provide opportunities for students to see their progress, and they need to assess the integrity of their plans and implementation of instructional design. The ongoing and cyclical nature of the teacher research process provides teachers with the opportunity to make adjustments in design to better serve the needs of all their students. It also allows teachers to evaluate their own decisions in light of student learning. Engaging in progress monitoring and post-assessment focuses on teaching and learning, a combination research shows to improve student achievement and transfer of knowledge.

• CODING – To begin the process of analyzing the large volume of data generated in the form of transcripts, field notes, photographs, and the like, the qualitative inquirer engages in the activity of coding. Coding is a procedure that disaggregates that data, breaks it down into manageable segments and identifies or names those segments. . . Coding requires constantly comparing and contrasting various successive segments of the data and subsequently categorizing them (p. 16).

  • Coding - breaking down and labeling identifiable parts of the data for easier analysis.
• MEMOING – A procedure suggested by Barney Glaser (Theoretical Sensitivity, Advances in the Methodology of Grounded Theory, Sociology Press, 1978) for explaining or elaborating on the coded categories that the fieldworker develops in analyzing data. Memos are conceptual in intent, vary in length, and are primarily written to oneself. The content of memos can include commentary on the meaning of a coded category, explanation of a sense of pattern developing among categories, a description of some specific aspect of a setting or phenomenon, and so forth. Typically, the final analysis and interpretation is based on integration and analysis of memos (p. 89 – 90).

  • MEMOING - Basically reflective writing discussing what the emerging patterns might mean, what the data is saying
• A final reason data analysis can appear difficult is that the inductive process teachers are about to enter into is uncertain. Many qualitative researchers we have worked with have described analysis as "murky," "messy," and "creative."

  • Action Research requires inductive process - What can I infer about this piece of data? Does this inference complement other data? What conclusion can I draw from these data together? Is there a pattern?

• teacher researchers must be patient as they allow their data to "speak," for itself and to lead them to their findings. Many teacher inquirers move through the four steps of description, sense-making, interpretation, and implication drawing as they analyze their data.

    

  • Action Research takes patience? But the sense of urgency in an intensive schedule leaves no room for patience.
• Data Analysis Step One: Description
• Data Analysis Step Two: Sense-Making
• For example, teachers might look at their data and see if a story emerges that takes a chronological form. Teachers may notice that their data seems to be organizing itself around key events. Or, teachers may see some combination of organizing units that are helpful.

  • Must be open to patterns - keep an open mind while studying the data: some things that appear to be "random" at first might actually be intricately connected, leading to an important insight.

• Data Analysis Step Three: Interpretation

    

• What was my initial wondering and how do these patterns inform it?
   What is happening in each pattern and across patterns?
   How is what is happening connected to . . .

    
   
  1. my teaching?
   
  2. my students?
   
  3. the subject matter and my curriculum?
   
  4. my classroom/school context?

  • Interpretation - What does this mean for my teaching, my students, my subject, my curriculum, and my classroom?

• Data Analysis Step Four: Implications

    

• when action researchers complete the first three steps of the data analysis process, they ask and answer one last set of implication questions as follows:

    
   
  1. What have I learned about myself as a teacher?
   
  2. What have I learned about my students?
   
  3. What have I learned about the larger context of schools and schooling?
   
  4. What are the implications of what I have learned for my teaching?
   
  5. What changes might I make to my practice?
   
  6. What new wonderings do I have?
   
    

  These questions call for teacher researchers to interpret what they have learned, to take action for change based on their study, and to generate new questions.

  • Implications - what I learned and what actions I will take to address this new understanding of my teaching, students, class, curriculum,... It is important to remember that ACTION research eventually requires teachers to ACT based on what the data suggests.

9 more annotations...

• Yet, because the process of action research honors the complexity of teaching, data collection cannot be reduced to just a collection of scores on various tests and assessments. Data collection for the teacher researcher means using a variety of ways to capture the action that occurs in the classroom.

  • Data = Test scores AND student samples, teacher observations, lesson plans, student interaction styles, notes, parent input (phone calls, emails, conferences). .. Action Research strives to provide a "total" picture of a specific question/problem.