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What does this mean?
It is clear to see that weekly pre- and post-test score averages increased each week. Throughout a week of intense phonics instruction following the structure of whole group direct instruction, small group direct instruction, multiple practices, and direct feedback, the increase in each week of the study is evident.
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What does this show?
Each colored section signifies the average class score for each phonics spelling pattern.
Each dot represents when the test was given.
Between three and eight words were tested per spelling pattern, which attributes to the different heights of the colored sections.
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What does this data mean?
It is clear to see an upward trend in class average scores in nearly all of the studied patterns throughout the whole study. This means that students were retaining what they had learned in each week of instruction. For example, even though the er, ir, ur (red section) phonics pattern was studied in January, student scores still improved each time they were tested on those words, even up to six weeks after instruction.
What about the yellow section?
The yellow section (eer, ere, ear) showed the only decline in average words in the section correct. This could be attributed to the fact that this is one spelling pattern that doesn't have a pattern in terms of place the sound occurs in a word to correspond to the letters needed to spell that sound. Students just had to memorize the possible spelling patterns for this sound rather than have a designated "if - then" mindset as with some other patterns.
What is the MAP test?
A standardized test in which students see a picture of a word they will spell and can listen to a recording of the word. There is a bank of letters and lines for each letter. Students drag the letter to the proper place in the word.
What does this show?
The test had 30 words to spell. The red section is the percentage of students who scored below 50% accuracy on this test. Orange and yellow show scores between 50% and 86% accuracy, and the green section shows students with the highest scores of 87% and higher.
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Why is this a piece of the data?
Even though the spelling patterns tested on MAP were not studied throughout action research, I was curious as to how students would perform with patterns they hadn't been introduced to in intense instruction. The hope was that students would apply phonemic awareness and strategies they'd learned from action research lessons to perform well on this test also.
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What does this data mean?
In the winter, student scores were fairly evenly distributed across score brackets. In fact, there were more students in the two lowest brackets than the two highest scoring brackets. In the spring there were two students who dropped below the 50% accuracy mark. However, in the spring, the orange and yellow brackets shrank, and the green bracket (highest scores) nearly doubled to half of the class, or 40% of students were scoring at least an 87% accuracy on this MAP tests.
Since the specific spelling patterns tested here were not studied in action research, improvement can be assigned to a few other reasons. One reason would be students had just been exposed to those words since their test in the Winter and were able to spell them better, A second reason for improvement could be the intense focus on phonemic awareness and identifying patterns in words. Since students could now break down words into individual sounds, they could better spell the words on this test.
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What about the red section?
In reflection, I would attribute the two students dropping to the red section to a few potential causes. This could be due to the fact that this test measured general spelling ability, but did not align with the six phonics sounds and spelling patterns that were studied throughout action research. Student disengagement during test time could have also been a factor in the score, and the students often had a hard time clicking and dragging the letters to the correct places, which lead to frustration while taking the test.
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It would have been ideal to see all MAP scores increase because of the focus on phonemic awareness throughout the study, yet I realized that six weeks of intense instruction may still not be enough to engrain phonemic awareness that transfers to the whole English language for spelling.
How does it all relate?
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It is clear to see how all the quantitative data relates to each other. The weekly pre- and post-tests, as well as large section tests, show continual growth. Without a structure of direct instruction, multiple practices, and direct feedback in specific phonics spelling patterns with an emphasis in developing phonemic awareness, such consistent data would not be found. The MAP data, though testing different skills than the six specific ones from action research, still shows improvement in most of the class, meaning the researched strategies implemented as action research were effective. Furthermore, even when scores decreased in MAP tests and large selection tests, the changes can be attributed to the same reasons.