Action Research Plan In Progress (week 3) 

The purpose of my inquiry is to see if we can improve ALL of our third graders' performance by implementing PLCs and common assessments in our school.
Setting of your study
The setting for my study will be the elementary school where I teach. My action research will be to determine how implementing 6 common assessments will improve our core instructional program and student performance in the third grade at Memorial Elementary School?
Target Population
My target population is going to be the third grade class of 2012-2013.This team will be a new team of teachers with a new team leader.I will be working with them this coming year and I will have the same planning period as they do.I will have easy access to this team and will be able to have first- hand knowledge of what the teachers do, see, and say in regards to the common assessments.I am considering adding the 2nd grade team to have another grade to compare results.

Selecting my sample

I will be selecting 3rd grade math because I will be the curriculum specialist for that team and will be able to work closely with the teachers and the students of that grade level.I’m choosing math because that is a focus for me as a specialist.I have been heavily involved with the math curriculum for the past 7 years. I have worked with these students as second graders and it will be enjoyable to see the results for these students.
Rationale for your sample size
The common assessments will be implemented throughout our entire school, but I believe using the entire school as a sample size will be too big.The data will be relevant to the third grade teachers and it will be interesting information to share with the entire staff at the staff meetings throughout the year.The sample size should be around 80-100 students.
Brief description of how you will conduct your research
I plan to first create a list collaboratively with the third grade teachers identifying the 6 non-negotiable skills every third grader should learn before moving to fourth grade.Once those have been identified, we will create our first common assessment.Once the first common assessment is created, we will give the test.After collecting the data, we will discuss the data and decide what will be the best course of action for the students that did not master the skill and for those that did master the skill.We will create an intervention plan and an enrichment plan.After a determined amount of time for intervention and enrichment, the intervention group will be re-assessed.At this point, the research is up to the third grade team talking about students and diving deep into what we think will improve instruction and learning. We will continue to implement these common assessments throughout the year and work collaboratively to make sure all students master the skills required to begin fourth grade successfully.I will survey teachers, interview teachers, interview the administrators, interview students, collect test data, graph data, collect student work, take notes from my own observations, if possible ask teachers to keep journals of their own reflections, possibly consider walk through results. Since these students will not have a STAAR test to compare, I will possibly use the NWEA MAP scores from BOY-MOY-EOY results data because I do will have 2nd grade data for them from MAP.
I think this is significant because we will be using actual data all throughout the school year and making changes along the way based on the outcome of our data to improve the learning of all of our students.