Inquiry focus for 2025

 Core Learning Area: Literacy

Focus Group: The group of students I am focussing on this year are Year 5-8 students who have been assessed as being strong academically in their year group, however who are behind their expected level in reading and/or writing.

Evidence:

You can see from this data that there are a high proportion of these students working below their expected year level in Reading or Writing in Year 5, 6 7 and 8.

Observations and Initial Questions:

From this group of students, there are some students who are extremely capable with using their reading and writing capabilities to access the curriculum and share their learning. There are also students in both classes who find the learning more challenging, either because they find it difficult to ‘read to learn’ or they find it difficult to share their learning or express their thoughts through writing.

For every child in this group that has a lower than expected reading age, their PAT Reading and/or Vocabulary levels were a lot stronger. Why is this? Is the issue with how these students are testing?

Does lack of ability to complete their work and manage their time have a correlation to reading or writing level?

Does reading and/or writing level have a correlation with language acquisition or oral language capabilities?

How I might verify this defined problem:

• Performance in most current testing
• Observations of classroom behaviours
• Language Acquisition

Draft Inquiry Focus:

How can I support students in Year 5 to 8 who have been tracked as being strong academically compared to their year-level peers, however who are working ‘below’ expectations for literacy levels (reading &/or writing).

Possible Research/ Resources:

Sheena Cameron Reading and Writing books
Literacy Learning Progressions
Revised English Curriculum Progressions
Research looking into the correlation of input (reading/listening) and output (writing/ speaking)

Possible Strategies:

• Think-Peer-Share. Pairing children up so they are working with a peer who is stronger in that area.
• Converstaion Starters/ Sentence Starter prompts
• Shorter activities which really focus in on building individual student needs (e.g. challenged more with input or output)

Next Steps:

• Provocations
• Integrated projects
• 1:1 readings or writing with individuals who need more support (including extra activities targeted at individual needs)
• Strong focus on reading and writing in extension classes.

PAT Maths Data

 

This Maths data above shows that every one of my target children made progress in Maths this year. It is really challenging to be able to say what exactly has caused this. When looking at last years results for the equivalent standardised test, you can see that all the children still made progress. Perhaps this group of children are just 'on track', irrespective of an intervention...This is definitely something to consider going forward.

This final graph shows all of this data together, to see progress made across 2 years in maths for these students.

Interestingly, from this data you can observe the summer drop off that we see and know well for reading.

Top 3 take aways from this year

 At our final Kāhui Ako meeting for the year, Chris Herlihy, Principal of Glen Taylor School, prompted us to think about what our Top 3 Take-aways would be from our inquiries this year. 

Here are the top 3 takeaways I have come up with based on my inquiry:

1. Students need mileage when it comes to maths, like we do in reading. That is, if we are wanting children to be able to better apply their multiplication knowledge, we need to ensure we are giving them lots of problems in lots of different contexts.

2. Giving students opportunities to grapple with problems individually as well as in groups is really important. Some children benefit from group work with some children and not others. I have not yet found an answer of how to be more effective with organising a class or group of students to best suit ALL students and their learning.

3. Children really benefit from structure and routine. I think ensuring a consistent structure to a maths programme in the classroom could really benefit children and their learning. That is, expectations are clear from day-to-day and the structure of the learning remains similar.

A challenge to consider next would be how to achieve both 2 and 3 in a consistent way.

Mathswhizz Progress

 At Pt England School, the classroom teachers have their students regularly work on Maths-Whizz. Maths-Whizz is a fantastic online tool which sets individualised maths tasks up for students, depending on their needs. Students only need to spend a focussed 15 minutes per day on Maths-Whizz to benefit largely from the programme. Maths-Whizz has strong connected to the NZ curriculum, and you can even look up student progress and achievement at different NZ Curriculum unit standards.

I looked into the Maths-Whizz data of my target group of students. In particular, I focussed in on their progress in multiplicative thinking at level 3 of the curriculum. This is because all but two students in my target group were already working at level 3 of the curriculum for multiplicative thinking (even though their school year level is only working at level 2 of the curriculum).

NA 3-2: Know basic multiplication and division facts

Here are the results:

As you can see, every students who was already working at this standard, continued to make progress throughout the year. 

6 of these students also began working at a level 4 unit standard throughout the year as well.

NA4-1: Use a range of multiplicative strategies when operating on whole numbers

Unfortunately, I didn't track progress on standard NA3-1, which includes using multiplication to solve word problems. This means I can't see progress in this field of more of an application of the multiplication.

However, as of Week 8, Term 4, this is where the students are working in this standard (NA3-1: Use a range of additive and simple multiplicative strategies with whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percentages):

Kāhui Ako Bursts & Bubbles 2023

At the Kāhui Ako Bursts & Bubbles presentation this year, the 2023 Kāhui Ako Teachers present 3 minute bursts about their inquiries this year.

Here is my presentation:

Here is a video of the afternoon's presentations:

GloSS results (Term 2 to Term 3)

 When it comes to the GloSS test results,  I need to look at these objectively as well as subjectively. At first look, it looks like these children have made incredible progress, almost too well! For example, one child looks like they have gone from a year 3 level to a year 8 level. It is important to remember that these graphs are only looking at the results from the multiplicative element of GloSS. It is important to consider all three elements of GloSS results (addition/subtraction, multiplication/division AND fractions/proportions/ratios). In addition, the students were assessed by two different teachers (myself in term 2 and Clarelle in term 3). Clarelle is their classroom teacher so students may have felt more confident explaining their thinking to her!

Considering all these things, these graphs do show that the students have made great progress, all the same!