Action Research >>
Understanding the Importance of Academics By Daniel Moore, Yangon International School dmoore@yismyanmar.com
Introduction “What are you learning? Why are you learning this?” These are two key questions that can tell a lot about the engagement of students’ learning in a classroom. If a student can answer the question, “What are you learning?” correctly, it shows that they are engaged and understand the objective of the lesson. If they can answer the question, “Why are you learning this?” correctly it shows the student can go a step further and see the practical application of the lesson and how the knowledge acquired in the lesson can be useful to have in the real-world, which may also influence how much the student values the content they are learning. The goal of this action research was to see if students could be trained to make more real-world connections on their own through practice and how that could benefit them. Method In order to conduct this research, students from three second grade classrooms were surveyed at three points during the school year. The survey was used to measure how well students value different mathematical skills, their ability to connect those skills to real-world applications, how well they were able to elaborate on their thoughts, if they could respond using an appropriate sentence stem, and what percentage of grammatical mistakes they made. In each classroom, teachers spent varying amounts of time discussing the importance and reasons for different mathematical skills learned. In Class A, the teacher spent about five minutes approximately every fourth lesson, especially when a new concept was introduced, discussing real-world applications. Sometimes students would brainstorm together to think of ideas for how the skill could be applied in the real-world but if they couldn’t, the teacher would share an example. In Class B, the teacher would share examples of real- world applications of the math skills when they were learning a new skill about a third of the time. In Class C, approximately five minutes was spent each lesson, where a new concept was introduced, discussing the importance of the lesson and how it could be applied to the real world. These students received practice on how to have one-on-one conversations with their peers about the lesson objective using sentence stems and relevant vocabulary to respond to one another. Students practiced this as a class for the first half of the school year, until the students took the second round of surveys. Changes in student answers were analyzed. When growth was observed in different areas, Class C stopped making real-world connections completely to see if any of their measured growth was retained by the third survey. Results and Reflection After the second round of surveys the answers of students changed and were analyzed. Class C showed a more significant growth than the other classes in making real-world connections, valuing different
math concepts, writing with the use of a sentence stem, and elaborating on their thoughts. No class showed more growth than the others in regards to making less grammatical errors. Due to these results Class C stopped making real-world connections completely to see if any of their growth would be retained for the third round of surveys. Upon completion of the third round of surveys, all classes answers were analyzed to see how they changed. Class C retained the ability to make specific real-world connections to the appropriate math skills while their ability to elaborate and write using sentence stems decreased slightly, though they still scored higher than the other classes. How they valued the different math skills however, decreased to less than that of the other classes, especially in areas in which students had no practice with relating those skills to realworld applications. Conclusion Connecting lessons taught in class to the real-world is a beneficial practice for students. If students can make connections to the realworld they will have a better understanding of the importance of what they are learning and can answer the question, “Why are you learning this?” on their own.Through guided discussion of the importance of different math skills with their peers, students can improve upon creating unique responses to the importance of math which can be applied to different subject areas, speaking and writing using sentence stems, and describing the importance of different skills with more elaborative conversation. However if the practice is not used consistently students may value some skills less than others based on which ones were discussed. By having students practice effective communication about real-world applications for lessons, teachers can observe students grow in several ways.
Fall 2018 Issue 33
