RMC Research Findings
Impact on Teacher Attitudes & Practices
"Involvement in your project has positively impacted my outlook on the future of education, my teaching philosophy and practices, and most importantly, the futures of my students now and those to come." - Michele Morgan, Tonasket Middle SchoolRMC Research evaluated the impact of the grant on the teaching practices of the participating teachers by examining the professional development provided by the grant, analyzing teacher surveys, and conducting teacher interviews and classroom observations.
Technology Skills:
All respondents agreed that as a result of their participation in the grant they felt more competent in the use of technology and better prepared to use technology with LD students. They also felt they had learned valuable computer skills and had gained knowledge about the use of technology to help LD students learn. When asked to comment about the impact of the project on their teaching, participants frequently reported that they had learned a great deal and that they were excited to see students become engaged in learning.
Technology Integration:
Classroom observations and teacher interviews illuminated differing levels of success in integrating the technology into the classroom. Several of the observed teachers incorporated the technology effectively as an accommodation for the LD students, who took notes, completed writing activities, and wrote papers using the computers alongside regular education students who completed the same activities using pencil and paper.
Some teachers found innovative ways to incorporate the technology, while others made the technology itself central to the curriculum for instance, by including a regular computer training lesson in the students' schedule. In some situations, however, the teachers struggled with obstacles presented by the technology. During one observation, the teacher asked her students to write paragraphs by hand, and students used the laptops only for a subsequent keyboarding activity. This teacher admitted to difficulties figuring out how to integrate the laptops because of the extensive time required for her students to physically set up and power up the laptops. In other observed classrooms, students spent a great deal of time searching for word processing files or keyboarding long paragraphs before they could even begin the lesson.
All of the interviewed teachers had continued in their second year of implementation to use the laptop computers as an integral part of their teaching, allowing students to take the computers to class or home at night and to use them for activities in the resource room. One interviewee whose students reportedly used the laptops "for everything" indicated that her students had become so accustomed to using the laptops that "they just grab the machines and go" when the get to class.
Changes in Teacher Practices:
Some teachers used the unique features of the technology to enhance their teaching. For instance, as part of a lesson about the writing trait organization, students in one class rearranged sentences into a logical order using the word processor's cut and paste functions. Another teacher in a pull-out class used the laptops to facilitate individualized learning by allowing students to complete the Start-to-Finish novels at their own pace. A different teacher allowed reticent students to give oral presentations by keyboarding their reports in Write:Out Loud so that the software could read the information to the class. Most teachers checked out laptops to students to work on assignments at home after school.
Documentation of Professional Development using NCS Mentor:
This software teaches a rubric-based scoring system for assessing the traits of student writing that is consistent with the 2-trait scoring methods used on the Washington State writing assessments. Learning this standardized scoring method allowed the participating teachers to assess their LD students' writing abilities uniformly and thus to measure improvement in writing over the course of the grant.
Participants submitted reports documenting their professional development using the NCS Mentor for Washington training software. Almost all of the respondents agreed that:
- the software taught an effective method for scoring student writing
- they learned valuable writing assessment skills
- using the software was an effective way to learn trait-based assessment
- the software was easy to use