This study has been very fun to undertake. I am not done collecting data and I won't be until late next week. I have been interested to see if there are other strategies that might also help in the development of active listening skills. One of the things that I have originally contemplated doing my research on from the beginning was mindfulness but I didn't really know quite how to weave it all together. I guess that the new question that I have been led to is: " Does mindfulness improve the active listening skills of my first grade students?" I think that using mindfulness as a strategy to improve active listening skills would be really interesting to take on. Once I have a clearer understanding of the effectiveness of my strategies I can have a clearer understanding of how to go about improving it.
I am also interested in the connection between executive functioning and active listening skills. Executive functions are a set of cognitive processes that are necessary for the cognitive control of behavior: selecting and successfully monitoring behaviors that facilitate the attainment of chosen goals. I wonder if there is a way to improve active listening skills by also working on executive functions. I am unaware of how one would do this ,but it seems that if a child is unable to pay attention and focus that active listening skills would be heavily impacted.
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I am clearly a bit behind in my research in comparison to everyone else. Just over Thanksgiving vacation I realized that I needed a control group to collect data from as well. I sent out parent letters to that group last week and have been getting them back. Not to mention, I also had an epiphany that I also needed to collect more information from parents and students. I also needed to re-submit my IRB to reflect that I would also be collecting a parent and student survey. I have started to receive these parent surveys back and begun synthesizing the data from them. I do have some pre-test data. I only collected this data on my focus group. I intend to gather this data on the whole class next week to get a better feel of what my class as a whole is able to do. I will also be having the control group take the pre-test as well. Although I am a bit behind in my data collection I have been observing these kids for the last few months as they practice their active listening skills. Those results alone are pretty staggering. Just from the small collection of strategies I have put in place my class as a whole has exhibited a large improvement in active listening skills. They are able to follow muti-step instructions with better accuracy. They are able to repeat information that has been said to them. These were my two primary success criterion.
Next Monday we will be administering the pre-test to the remainder of the class. I will use this assessment as an opportunity to progress monitor the kids who already have a pre-test on the books. I will also have the control group take the test. Then, in the days following the pretest there will intensive active listening intervention delivered. The post test will be given the day before Christmas break. I have learned from this study that with very little intervention students are able to make improvements on their active listening. I have also noticed that teaching metacognition in any form where you make students aware of how their brain works and teaching them to be intune with the goings-on that takes place as they learn new material can help them with their learning behaviors. Trying these new strategies has helped them to be more cognisant of the importance of what and how they are learning. I look forward to finishing the data gathering process so that I have some hard data to back up the observations I have made. |
AuthorI am a first grade teacher who is passionate about her students and learning new things! Archives
January 2019
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