As
a STAAR subject teacher, I am passionate about the preparation that goes in to
getting these students prepared for test. I have also taught and facilitated various
acceleration programs and am eagar to see the patterns that form in relation to
student success and which prep classes they have been involved in.
I
am still in the process of gathering the most recent testing data. I have
constructed a detailed spreadsheet of what prep classes have been taking place
and the overall success and demographics of the students in classes. The next
step is to identify patterns and analyze why things are/are not being
successful. I will be looking at time frame, duration, class size and material
being used for each of the prep classes that have been taking place over the
course of this year. Once this is done, I can sit down and have a meeting with
administrators and testing coordinators.
At a general preliminary glance, I have seen that the summer
acceleration classes did not have as much success as anticipated. These classes
incorporated many student tutors and had teachers facilitating the process. The
pull out acceleration has had a much high success rate. These are things I will
discuss with adminstrators and testing teams upon the collection of all relevant
data.
The goal for this action research is to decide on what
methods work best for maximizing success on the STAAR test. The data collected
is based solely on the Algebra 1 test and may vary across subject areas. The
results and reflections of this research will serve as a guide for methods that
should continue to be used and others that could be tweaked across all subject
areas.
