Planning the tools, measures and approaches I plan to use in my inquiry

Kāhui Ako Achievement Challenge 5: Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/ key competency using symbols, languages and texts.

My Inquiry Problem/ Challenge: Children living in a digital world, where key competencies are essential, require ubiquitous access to cybersmart scaffolds and resources which are not currently available.

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The Manaiakalani data from 2018 shows a vast difference in progress and achievement in writing compared to reading. While Manaiakalani writing data appears to get closer and closer to the national norm between year 2 and year 8, the reading data does not. In fact, when tracked over three years, the reading data remains almost parallel to the national norm. While writing data, when tracked over three years, does move up and down a lot more (due to the summer drop off, which is being addressed by the summer learning journey), the data does move closer to the norm over the years.

This area of the data presented to us from Woolf Fisher is important for me to consider in my inquiry as it supports the importance for teaching cybersmart to support children in their reading. We have an amazing resource available to us for teaching and learning however we aren't able to utilise this to it's full potential if we aren't supporting children by providing the essential skills required to be critical with information which is read online.

Even so, through my inquiry, I am going to have to explore ways to measure student learning through the key competencies. We are fortunate to have a number of standardised tests to measure how children are doing in reading and writing. However, we don't have the same tests to measure how children are doing in their learning of key competencies.

Tools/measures/approaches I plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to my challenge.

To measure how children are doing in their learning of key competencies when online, I plan to use the following tools, measures and approaches:

- Student survey (beginning and end of year): This survey will include a number of questions to test what children know about making smart decisions online. Doing this survey at the beginning and end of the year will create a way I can measure children's knowledge of cybersmart and use of key competencies when making decisions online.

- Teacher survey (beginning and end of year): This survey will include a number of questions to gain information about how teachers are currently teaching cybersmart in their classrooms and the areas of the cybersmart curriculum which they judge to be the most essential for the year level they teach. This information will help me to see if there is a particular progression of student learning in cybersmart throughout the years at school (between year 2 and year 8).

- Cybersmart 'Tip clip' tool (to be created by the children): This tool is going to be developed and designed throughout the year by children in my class as they learn about different aspects of cybersmart. The idea of this tool will not be to teach the curriculum but to create a ubiquitous, visible and engaging tool for children which will reinforce elements and remind children of certain elements of cybersmart which are necessary in order to make critical and thoughtful decisions online. Through the creation of this tool, I will make observations about how children approach various situations where they have to think critically or problem solve.

- Record/Log of times when children have had to think critically or problem solve online: This measure will be an important collection of information to keep track of the areas of cybersmart which children are most challenged in terms of making critical decisions online. This will help to paint a picture of areas of the cybersmart curriculum which may need to be addressed throughout the year.