5326 Reflection

This course has honestly been on of the most enjoyable courses that I have taken in this program.  I thought the timing of this course was perfect because it was the first one of the semester, which also happened to be when our campus was seeking out community involvement.  To be honest, when it comes to volunteering for school events on my campus, I usually turn a deaf ear to them. However, this year I wanted to see exactly how community involvement worked and what all went "behind the scenes." Sure enough, majority of what we talked about in class was talked about at school. We discussed the importance of Title 1 funds and how they impacted the classroom. We also met together for the first time as a Site Based Decision Making Committee to go over the goals for the year. Finally, the day before this course ended, we had our first school event which was a "Bingo Night" at our campus. The turnout was tremendous! I am glad that this course started when it did! I was able to get so much out of it mainly because I started becoming involved in my school!

Action Research Summary

I am currently putting the finishing touches on my Action Research Project.  My project was to see if a behavior modification program would have any effect on the overall grades and behaviors of a 5th grade class on our campus. For this program, each student was listed on a website with an avatar next to their name. Students would accumulate points over time in which the points could be redeemed for prizes.  Students would be given a point when they were either "on task" "raising their hand" and a few other categories. Students would be deducted a point if they "talked" "did not bring their homework" or "being disrespectful." The biggest component of this software was the fact that each time a point was awarded for positive behavior, a bell would ring and alert the student(s) that a point was being awarded. However, when a point was deducted from a student, a negatively sounding bell would sound, alerting the class that someone had lost a point.  I started off with student's first 9-week grades and used that as a baseline. I used the 2nd and 3rd weeks to run my experiment. By the 4^th nine weeks, there had been so many students switching classes for standardized testing purposes that it became impossible to record data accurately.  As much as the teacher enjoyed using this software, unfortunately, there was no major change in the grades of the students. However, the teacher did explain to me that he did notice an overall improvement in how the students behaved in their class that year.