Journal+Reflections+on+Action+Research

 Overall, it is easy to see that my students made progress. This in itself is significant and the driving force for me to continue setting up each unit with this format. When you are able to see the standards directly met with these questions it is motivation to continue using this type of measurement, as well as confirmation your students are learning and meeting the required standards. Of course, some students didn't make it to proficient knowledge and there are those that were advanced in their knowledge. Nonetheless, it identified those students and gave me an opportunity to target them for positive feedback or additional instructions. The results were what I expected. Reality is though, these kids that met the standard, probably would have met it any way it was taught, but maybe working their way through the flow chart graphic they created and the web linked animations enabled more of them to have a deeper understanding. I didn't survey my students, but I think they liked seeing their progress.  Also, I taught photosynthesis first and discussed it's relationship to cellular respiration. I believe it possibly impacted the Cellular Respiration Pretest scores, as they were higher than I expected for the beginning of the topic.


 * Positive Impacts were:**
 * Increased __ability to use Achievement Series__ as a diagnostic and measurement tool in my classroom. This had been something I had wanted to work into my classroom planning for a long time. I now can implement these questions for each unit.
 * Student __familiarity and practice__ with standardized questions on these basic life science standards. Students need this type of practice and feeback. It is an assessment of their knowledge and I believe it can help sharpen a students focus throughout each topic studied.
 * Real-time data to analytically __assess student mastery__ of the standards and the data to identify student __weaknesses of the standards__ specifically in content
 * Students l__earned more about using Microsoft Word__ documents to create flowcharts, concept maps, hyperlinking, etc.


 * Difficulties I encountered:**
 * __Finding time to follow up__ with kids that didn't successfully test on the standard on the post-test
 * __Finding time to meet with team members__, although my prinicipal arranged for the inservice for myself and a few other teachers to get started with Achievement Series