SLO/Action Research

Student Learning Objectives (SLO) are very important to the growth and the development of our students. I think creating an SLO is essential to ensure that teachers are meeting the needs of their students to foster the growth mindset and continue in a progressive nature forward in education.

I conducted and created an SLO/Action based research assignment in Ms. Smith and I's Animal Care and Management class as we were discussing our unit of poultry. After discussing with Ms. Smith we both wanted to conduct some research on our questioning techniques of our classes. So my guiding question for my research was as follows "How do my questions affect my student understanding of content material?"

I collected data over a two week time period in our class. Over the first week, I asked general questions to our students as I was teaching content. Ms. Smith recorded the questions I was asking our students so I could do some research on my questions at the end of the week. Some examples of questions that I asked included "what" questions. From my research these are basic questions that students may answer if they are able to remember information. These are questions that simply scratch the surface of our students' understanding and does not effectively demonstrate their cognitive understanding of information.

On the second week of data collect I began to ask our students more in depth questions and questions that are higher one the Bloom's Taxonomy scale. These questions included questions such as 'why' and 'how come'. These in depth questions ensured that my students had to apply their knowledge and understanding to tell me "why".

At the end of each week I gave my students a confidence quiz for them to evaluate their confidence of the information based on their understanding of material. Were they confident in the material we were learning? In addition our students had to create 2 future test questions to illustrate to me what questions they were able to form based on their understanding.

The results that I found were incredible. As the second week came to an end my students were very confident in the content material and the questions that they posed were very good. They were able to write questions that made them think about writing a complete sentence as an answer and not just one word. I was so proud to see the growth that our students had made through this research. In addition our students did incredibly well on their poultry assessment which made me very very proud.

~Ms. Timmons