Drawn on my iTouch

Here are the questions I've answered for month 4. The questions and answers are posted both here and on my action research site.

What is your official problem statement?

My official action research question is: Will using music improve math skill acquisition and retention?

How did your research end up shaping this?

In scanning articles, I found opinions and research to refuse and support the efficacy of music increasing learning. My initial thought is that it will increase learning. After all, we all learned our ABCs that way and many of us still remember the order of the alphabet letters by singing the song. The tune stuck in our long-term memory. Some of my research actually began last year when I team taught a 4^th grade math class. My co-teacher and I spontaneously came up with a hand game (like patty cake) to accompany a rhyme about estimating. The students loved it, and remembered it for the rest of the year. This experience started my thinking about music and learning.

What outcomes are you expecting?

I am expecting to find success in teaching students math rules and helpful hints using musical jingles. For each math unit, students are given a pretest and a posttest. I am expecting to see a larger increase in the percentage of correct answers compared to students in another 4^th grade classroom that doesn’t use music as a teaching tool. I believe that if I can come up with catchy tunes, that are short, the students will more easily remember the words and thereby how to do problems, check their work and be more engaged in their learning.

How are your critical friends helping in this process?

My critical friends are helping me by questioning my action research statement, as it has been refined, helping me to bring it more into focus, from broad to specific. They are also helping with encouragement and ideas, from programs that will help me in creating tunes to various programs to deliver the final project (tune with words and possibly animation) or for students to create their own tunes with. My critical friends are composed of a variety of backgrounds, enabling each to offer feedback from a different perspective. One is a principal and previous music director, one a teacher of regular and special education, one a speech pathologist, and one who is very adept at computer technology.

How is this month’s course helped in shaping your ARP?

This month’s course, Emergent Technologies in a Collaborative Culture, is helping me locate web 2.0 tools, that will assist with my project, and utilize varies forms of organization, information searches, and collaboration. The blogs of classmates are helping me to discover new tools, as well as see the reviews they have formulated about some of them. There are still a few weeks left in this course that, I’m sure, will show me even more that can be done through collaboration with my classmates and colleagues.