Week 30: Reflect on your evidence

In my action plan I planned to use both qualitative and quantitative data in my inquiry. My qualitative data was to be collected through observations and I had a simple questionnaire and assessment sheet to collect some quantitative data. So far, my data collection has been a little ad hoc. For the 4 weeks of my inquiry so far I have been in class for 15 days and out of class for 5, with a 2 week school holiday in the middle. This has made it difficult to establish a routine.

Originally, I decided to complete an observation sheet as I thought making a video would be too distracting for the students. However, the 15 minute conversations each morning have been heavily dependent on my input, making it difficult to record observations at the same time. My school is implementing Iris Connect, PLD software where teachers record themselves teaching as a way to reflect on their practice. As a result, I will start recording next week rather than completing the written observations.

Some of the things I have noticed so far:

• Most students are engaged.
• We all need to increase our vocabulary.
• One of my students is an expert who models risk-taking and keeps the conversation active. When this student is absent the session is much more arduous.

One surprising result is that when there is a fluent adult speaker in the room the students revert back to english more often. However, having the support of a fluent adult in the room to help with sentence structure and pronunciation is a huge benefit for me.

Babione (2014) describes coding as an interpretive technique to sort data into categories as an aid to finding patterns. I did not have any predetermined codes for analysing data when I developed my plan but the emerging categories I have identified so far are:

• The impact of a student who is able to lead the session.
• The impact of a fluent adult speaker.
• Scaffolding the conversation with a shared book at the start of the session.

As I follow these patterns I need to develop a holistic understanding rather than getting lost in details (Efron & Ravid, 2013). It is important to keep referring back to my inquiry focus.

I was able to chart my survey results. The pie chart shows the students’ vocabulary knowledge at the beginning of the inquiry. 8 of my 25 students were absent for the survey so their results are not shown.

Words known in te reo Māori:



I then created a bar graph to show the students’ ability to create simple sentences. 4 of the 17 students present chose not to respond.


For my final survey question, 11 of 25 students (48%) felt confident that we could speak te reo Māori exclusively for 15 minutes.

The evidence I have collected so far has provided some baseline data which I can use to compare with data I will collect at the end of the inquiry period. This will show whether my students’ knowledge of te reo Māori has increased. As my inquiry is into the use of conversational te reo Māori, can it only really be answered through qualitative data in the form of observation. In the future I will record our “korero anake te reo Māori” sessions and fill in the observation sheet from the video as this will give a more accurate representation of what is happening in class.

References:

Babione, C. (2014). Practitioner teacher inquiry and research. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Efron, S. E., & Ravid, R. (2014). Action research in education : a practical guide. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com