The closure

Wow!

This has been a crazy week.  I gave the summative assessment (the English III MSL) two weeks ago in hopes of closing the research and finishing my paper.  Remember, I am a biology teacher, and not English. The english teacher had the English IV answer key for the English III MSL and did not have the correct key.  This also means that the Exam that was given as a midterm also was not graded yet (Yikes! it had been 4 weeks ago!) so I felt that the data that was taken was valid as they did not have the 'correct' answers yet.


Finally, last Tuesday, I received the correct answer key for the English III exam and had the kids upload their answers again so they could compare the results of  what they had made in January to the new score in April after the instruction of the close reading strategies.

Data analysis:

It is evident that the close reading strategies did assist in deepening student understanding of the content at hand, however the utility of the strategies correlates with text at hand.  Visualize and connect was the most difficult to do with creative writing, but the easiest to usefully apply to informational text such as chemistry.

Students utilized the strategies correctly, they knew how to apply to different situations and did receive valuable understanding from it.

My follow up to this is to see if the levels of questions required of the students to respond to text would then determine the most effective strategy to use for the task at hand.