Thursday, April 16, 2015

Does learning style correlate with student engaement.

Coming up with a plan let alone an idea for my action research project was tough. I had one plan and once I taught my AgriEcology class for a week a new idea came and I went with it. This class is made up of 23 students and there is a lot of character in this class.

I planned my populations unit all on visual and hands on activities thinking it would be fun and they would like it better than lecture and boring stuff (at least I think that). Within the first couple days I was in the "I just want to hit my head off a desk" frustration mode. In the middle of activities they would sit down, talk, or throw objects across the room. What was I doing wrong?

I decided after the unit exam for populations I was going to make them take a learning style inventory and from those results tailor the energy unit. From my results I got a top two of auditory and tactile. To change my unit up I added in more lecture and group discussion and than some hands on activities.

To test them for the unit exams I set up the exams exactly the same with 10 true or false, 17 multiple choice, and 3 essays pick two. The exams were worth 74 points. I recorded all their scores for my data tables. After comparing the test results to one another the populations graph suggests that maybe they were bored due to prior knowledge on the concepts which could be what cause the lack of engagement. The energy unit exam scores came out with a more normal distribution bell curve compared to the highly shifted left bell curve with the populations exam.

When I first looked at the results I was like I failed. But, than I remembered that not every thing you do is going to turn out how you expected. I got mixed results where some proved part of my hypothesis (I propose that tailoring lessons to meet individual’s learning style (or modality) will increase engagement, decrease behavior issues, and improve unit test scores) and where others didn't.

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