Week 2 - Research

In this week's blog, I will share my possible research topics:
1. In what ways do our after school intervention tutorials help our at-risk students pass the TAKS?
2. How can we increase the commended scores for our students on the TAKS test in all subject areas?
3. How should we incorporate the new ELPS (English Language Proficiency Standards) into our science curriculum?

When talking to my campus supervisor, we decided on these three possible topics based on information gathered in our campus improvement plan. Our biggest goal this year is to improve our commended scores on the TAKS. I thought this would be a great topic for my action research. Unfortunately, after exhaustive research, I could not find any literature on what could be done to raise the scores. Therefore, I had another meeting with my supervisor where we then decided to do research on how to incorporate the ELPS into the science curriculum. We are currently going through a lot of professional development to learn about the new ELPS that must be incorporated into our curriculum. Since I am in the science department, she thought that it would benefit our entire science department to find out effective ways on incorporating the new ELPS. From my research in science, she also hopes that I will be able to come up with effective instructional strategies that could be used across all subject areas.