And The Journaling Begins...

Today, I distributed journals to all of the students in my 3rd block class - even though they won't all be used in the study, they will all be participating in the reading/journaling process.  

I posed the following question to my students: 

What are your feelings about reading?

I chose to ask this question because I wanted to see what they really thought about it.  Although I have been with them all year, I realized that I have have never posed this question, and what better way to begin this research process than to see what's going on in their heads.  How do they REALLY feel. Fortunately, I have a great relationship with this class, and they know that they can be honest with me, so they certainly didn't feel as though they had to sugar-coat their responses to please me.  

Overall, this class has very low reading scores as indicated by the STAR test, which we take every three weeks.  According to our last assessment (1/28/15), 75% of this class is reading below the 25th percentile among similar-aged peers.  19% are reading between the 25th & 49th percentiles, and 10% are between the 30th and 74th.  

After reading their responses, it makes perfect sense why their scores are so low.  They absolutely HATE to read.  The majority of the students wrote about how boring they find it to be.  They also reported that it makes them very sleepy.  I responded to each of their responses with some form of question and plan to keep the conversation going in order to uncover more underlying sources for this hatred.  This is making me VERY excited as I feel very hopeful that this is going to enlighten me so much about them and more importantly, they are going to be enlightened about themselves through this process.