CoL Inquiry 2021: The Challenge of Student Learning

 The last couple of weeks has involved lots of learning about the children in my class and their learning needs. I teach the year 5-8 extension children. Over the last couple of weeks I have:

- Tested the year 5-6 extension children on spelling. Through this, I found there were about 4 children whose needed work on their spelling however spelling was not enough of a challenge for this group of children to spend a whole year on as an inquiry project.

- Tested the year 5-8 extension children on vocabulary. After discussions with deputy principal, Toni Nua, we both agreed that language development was something our extension children needed to work on. We decided to test the children on a PAT vocabulary test to find out more information about this.

Here is the data from the vocabulary test:

*Stanine 5+ is at or above where we would expect the child to be for their year level. 

With the year 5-6 children, at first glance it appeared there was not a challenge as all but one child scored a stanine 5-7. I did however wonder whether I could look into the disparity between what this data showed and why/if we don't seem to see that same level in oral language or written language. From what I know of the year 6 children, having taught them last year and just through observing them in their project we have been working on this year, I would say their oral language is definitely not as high as this. It would be interesting to find out WHY and WHAT I can do to support their oral language development.

Therefore, the challenge of student learning which I am going to look into is this:

There is a disparity between the level of oral language and vocabulary which the year 5-6 extension children use and the level of language and vocabulary they can read and recognise in written texts.