Action Research, Anyone?

I am taking a graduate course to assist me in making decisions that will improve my practice and thus student learning.  This course is appropriately entitled action research! I will be making changes to the structure of my class, collecting data, assessing the data/reflecting and making more changes, continuing the cycle.

I am looking at looking closely at helping my AVID kids improve their reading comprehension and their writing abilities (synthesis) to communicate what they understood.  They are weak in grammar, sentence structure, subject-verb agreement and punctuation.  If I can make any improvements on students' progress through the use of close reading strategies and then help them formulate complete responses to essay questions, then we have success.

I plan to research effective close reading strategies then provide a pre-assessment on their abilities to form a base line for each student.   Implementation will occur in sections so we can learn how to do this (I have no idea!).  I will collect data on my students by randomly pulling cornell notes or learning logs from my class and any other class that they have, looking for evidence of transference from direct instruction to application in their every day writing. I will first focus on reading comprehension (close reading) and then move on to strategies to assist in the synthesis of articulating what they have read when given a prompt.