Action Research

This has been a very challenging and stressful class so far. I am pleased with the topic I have chosen. Of course, that could all change if I hit some snags along the way. I decided to study the effects of interactive wiki reports on learning. I want to see if the children learn more when they collaborate on a report and create a web page than they do when they write a traditional written report. I still have a lot of work to do on the specifics, assessments, research proposal, etc. Right now I plan to assign each student a historical figure to read about and research. I will use the same list of people in both the experimental and control groups. I want to do some sort of pre-test to check their background knowledge about the people they are learning about. Following their reading and research, the control group will write a paper about what they have learned. The experimental group will create a wiki page about the person studied. This group will also collaborate with their classmates and help each other create the pages. Once the final products are complete, I will give the same test I gave before the research as a post-test. I will check to see if their is any significant difference between the results of the two groups. I will also give all the students a short survey to see how they felt about their learning as well as their interest level. I have a lot of work to do, but I am just trying to do one thing at a time!