Cycle 2 Progress

Just prior to Spring Break, all students have completed the writing of their avatar stories. Thirteen students have completed Cycle 1 and 2 inasmuch as creating the story, painting the avatar, publishing their story to a DVD and testing on the story. As soon as school resumes on April 12th, the remaining nine students will publish their avatar stories to DVD and take a comprehensive test on the story that they created. The picture to the left is one of my students who is creating a digital story from her written story.

My goal in the creation of my action research project was to create a strategy that would help students to identify the main idea in a story. The strategy I used was that my students would first create an avatar, then write a story about the avatar. I tested each student on their own story for comprehension, fluency and main idea. The thirteen students who have completed all phases of the Cycles, passed each section of the assessment, thereby demonstrating to me they understood main idea.

In further assessments of main idea, these thirteen students have all succeeded in identifying main idea. Next week, I will assess the remaining nine students.

My literature review research demonstrated that there has been very little research conducted in the area of Title 1 students, reading comprehension and specifically targeting main idea. However, some of the research which targeted struggling readers overall, was of benefit to my study.

The information in each of the courses I have completed at Full Sail University has contributed to the validity of my research. My course this month, Learning Management Systems and Organizations has enlightened me in the arena of e-learning. Students do respond better to digital stories. I have set up a few e-learning sites for my students to access for the remainder of the school year. Already, I am seeing improvement in reading comprehension and fluency.

Some of the games I have scheduled my students to play as a part of their core studies has enriched their vocabulary and math skills. I would say that the skill building that is embedded into the games is subliminal. Students do not realize that they are building skills.

One reason students have all agreed upon in their interviews about digital stories is that they are fun and interesting. A student stated that the digital stories seem to be alive whereas the stories in their textbooks are difficult to follow.

Those of us who are visual learners would probably agree that watching the movie is more entertaining than reading the book. It may be a toss up for some, however, whether one would retain more information from viewing the movie or reading the book. In either case, my strategy seems to be working.

After the final DVD's have been created, I will pull together all the data from Cycle 2 and compare it to Cycle 1.