FIN Commons

Summary

Las Positas College

At Las Positas College, the desire to better understand students’ experiences was piqued by program-level data recently generated by the college’s institutional researcher. This data shows that students in the two-semester developmental English track are less successful than those in the open-entry, accelerated, one-semester course. Students in the accelerated course were much more likely to complete their class and go on to earn higher grades in English 1A. Furthermore, students who have higher reading scores were more likely to withdraw when enrolled in the two-semester developmental sequence. These findings will serve as the starting point for a collaborative team of English and Counseling faculty. The goal will be to use collaborative Inquiry to connect student voices, institutional data, and program innovation to examine LPC’s English curriculum: Is a two-semester developmental English track needed? If so, which students need this track? What processes are required to identify and guide students to one track or the other? And what instructional support structures are required to help all students be successful?

Team Leader:
Elena Cole / English
925-424-1250
ecole@laspositascollege.edu

Team Members:
Dr. Catherine Eagan / English, English Lab Program Coordinator
Michelle Gonzales / English
Dr. Karin Spirn / English
Nancy Wright / ESL Counselor
Helen Machuga / Instructional Assistant

Plans for Data Collection and Analysis

A. Zoom-Lens Inquiry: Focusing on Students

1) What data will you gather and analyze on individual students? (e.g. student work, self-reflections, interviews, videotaped think-alouds or problem-solving)

We will conduct interviews with students selected from two courses, our entry-level basic skills course, 100A, and our “accelerated” basic skills course, 104. To ensure that we hear from a diverse group of students, we have identified four sections whose students we plan to interview, two of which meet at night and two of which meet during the day.

We will develop questions for the interviews with our student co-inquirers who will also conduct the interviews. Working with student from mass communications, we will videotape these interviews, some of which will be used in making a video to show staff and faculty as a “training” tool.

The counselor on our team will also interview students who drop from these classes. We may ask students whom we call if they would be willing to come in to be interviewed on videotape.

In addition, we will collect and analyze student work: the “Student Information Sheets” that students fill out at the beginning of the semester in all of our basic skills classes, the students’ reflections that they will write at the end of the semester and the final.

2) How do you imagine this data will help you understand the problem/issue you’re investigating? In other words, how does the data connect to and inform the overall focus of your inquiry?

Our interest in developing better means of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about students’ experience in the English program was piqued by the new types of program-level data that we have been receiving from our institutional researcher in the past few years. Las Positas has two options for students who don’t assess into transfer-level English: a one year sequence of two courses, 100A and 100B, or a one-semester “accelerated” class, 104. At the end of 100B or 104, students who pass the class are admitted into transfer-level English (English 1A). There is no mechanism to formally place students in the one-year option, 100A / 100B, or the one-semester option, 104; students place themselves in either 104 or 100A unless they happen to get advice from a counselor.

In 2007, our institutional researcher gave us some data revealing that students in the two-semester track are less successful than those in the one-semester course. Students enrolled in 104 were much more likely to complete their class than students enrolled in 100A. The 104 students also went on to earn higher grades in English 1A than the 100A / 100B students. Furthermore, 100A students who have higher reading scores were likely to drop the course. Our curiosity was ignited by this data as the research accurately reflected our experiences when teaching these classes. Individually, we had wondered why we were so much less effective in our 100A classes, why our attrition was so high in comparison with our 104 classes. In department meetings, we had discussed the frustration we had in 100A trying to address the differing needs of students with a wide range of skill-levels; we worried that we were unable to offer some students the attention that they needed while finding that other students were not challenged enough by the curriculum.

This data caused us to articulate some of the questions about our basic skills students and their performance in our classes that had been haunting us: as a department, how might we better identify, understand and describe the skills and challenges of our basic skills students? How might we define the range of our basic skills students’ skills, talents, knowledge gaps and challenges? Does our program address our students’ needs? How can we meaningfully assess this? Why is English 104 so much more effective? How might we change our placement process, our course offerings, our curriculum, to better support the 100A student in particular? How might we most effectively allocate program resources to address students’ needs throughout the program once we’ve more accurately identified them? Is the support that we do offer appropriate and helpful? Where might the support that we offer be useful, and where might it be a hindrance? Ultimately, we hope the data will inform our choices regarding program, course, and curriculum design so that we will effectively meet students’ needs.o

The goal of the interviews will be to get close to select students’ experience, to access and collect students’ thoughts as they are experiencing the program. We expect that this will teach us about students’ attitudes, self-perceptions, and experience while in the basic skills English courses. We hope that these interviews will offer insights about why some students stay in these courses and some students drop. We also want to know what we could be doing to clear away road blocks while offering support where it’s needed. As our inquiry question focuses on how we may best structure our course offerings and use our resources to help students reach their academic goals, these interviews will be a vital addition to the institutional data that has guided our previous programmatic-level decision-making process.

The goal of analyzing the Student Information Sheets and student reflections will be to examine themes emerging from the interviews on a broader scale. We will also be able to compare and contrast individual students’ responses to these assignments with what they reveal in the interview. This may help us analyze the effectiveness of these assignments as data-collection instruments, another goal of our inquiry being the development of an effective program-wide means of data-collection and interpretation.

Analyzing the students’ performance on the final will give us an opportunity to measure the effectiveness of the final as a way of identifying students’ readiness to progress to the next course, helping us improve our current measures of student learning.

Being an important complement to the data we receive from our institutional researcher, all of this data will inform other departmental efforts to improve our services for students. We are currently working with faculty from Student Services to evaluate the efficacy of the placement tool, Accuplacer, and to devise a plan to embed counseling in some of our basic skills English classes. The data that we collect for our zoom-lens inquiry will be a valuable resource as we plan and pilot innovative approaches to placement and advising.

3) When and how will you collect this data? (e.g. Which classes will you target? Where will you conduct interviews or think-alouds?)

A key component to our student will be the comparison and contrast of the students’ experiences and work in the two different courses. Through examining the difference between the students’ feedback and work in the most entry-level basic skills (100A) as opposed to the accelerated course (104), we hope to glean more insight into how we might more effectively design the curriculum for these courses and advise students as to which course might be more appropriate for them.

We will also be piloting two sections of a new course in the fall of 2009, English 102. Unlike all of our other basic skills courses, this course will not have instructional-assistant support and will not require the use of a collaboratively-developed schedule and materials. Our pilot in the fall will involve collecting zoom-lens data that can be compared to the data we are collecting in the spring, helping us to determine factors that may be influencing the institutional research data.

We will most likely conduct the interviews in a site away from the classroom where students will have privacy.

4) When will you analyze this data? (e.g. mid-semester team retreat, after lesson-study session, at the end of the semester; )

We have scheduled bi-monthly meetings in Mondays at times when the entire team can attend. We will also meet as a team at the end of the semester for a one day team retreat to prepare to share the data with the entire department. We will meet for two days with the entire full-time department faculty and staff in June and with all of the part-time faculty in August, focusing on discussing the data we collected and the plan for the Fall of 2009.

5.) How will you analyze the data? (e.g. analyzing student work with a rubric or analytic frame like Polya’s method for problem-solving or Perry’s scheme for student development; analyzing themes in student self-reflections according to their performance in the class – how did the responses of students who did not pass compare/contrast with students who performed well?)

As described above, we will identify and analyze themes that surface in the interviews, Student Information Sheets, and student reflections, attempting to create meaningful categories that will inform our analysis of the institutional data that we receive. We will compare, contrast, and analyze the students’ performances on the finals and in the classes. One of our goals will be to identify markers suggesting which students need more support and which students would benefit from less. During our meetings, we will take notes in the form of “analytic memos,” tracking our questions and noting unifying ideas, themes, and concepts which emerge as a part of our analysis of the data.

6) What questions/concerns do you have about this element of your Inquiry? How can your Inquiry Coach support you in this phase of your Inquiry?

We would benefit from guidance with interpreting data. We will also want feedback about our tools for / approach to collecting data; as we progress with the grant, we hope to improve our methods and approach.

B. Mid-Range Shots: Focusing on the Classroom

1. What is the problem or question that is central to your team’s FIN inquiry?

Our central question is how best to structure our basic skills English program to serve our growing student population, given our limited resources.

2. What do you hope to learn about your students and their learning by conducting a Lesson Study?

One thing that we would like to learn is how the regular class and the outside lab collectively contribute to student learning. What are students learning in the lab that they could not as easily learn in class? How does the learning in the lab support the learning in the class, and vice-versa? We would also like to learn whether our grammar lessons are effective for teaching students to construct complete and complex sentences.

3. Identify a specific lesson in which your team can investigate your inquiry’s central problem or question. Explain the connection between this lesson and your inquiry.

We would like to observe the lab instruction related to the Sentence Structure workbook. This lab is taught by instructional assistants and largely focuses on grammar issues. By observing the lab that accompanies our basic skills courses, we will see what our students are learning in the lab and better coordinate our in-class work with the lab work. Visiting labs for both English 100a and English 104 will also help us evaluate whether the students in the different courses receive different benefits from the lab, as well as which students benefit most from the lab assistance.

4. Why do you think this lesson will be a good vantage point from which the team can think about teaching and through which the team can observe students learning?

The lab provides more individualized and hand-on assistance for the students, making it an optimal place to observe student learning. We often rely on our labs for the bulk of the instruction for the grammar lessons, so observing lab will allow us to see how the students are applying concepts that may only be reviewed quickly in the regular classroom.

5. What are the learning outcomes for this lesson? Describe both the global and long-term goals for students’ academic and personal achievement, as well as the goals that are more immediate to the lesson and content-specific.

While we know the practice of teaching grammar in college English courses is controversial, and while we agree that there are many valid reasons to be suspicious about the effectiveness of this practice, we do not want to abandon the teaching of grammar but rather develop best practices for it.

Short-term outcomes (the lesson itself) for students include:

· locating subjects, verbs, and modifiers in a sentence

· distinguishing main clauses from modifying clauses

Medium-term outcomes (from later lessons that will build on this one) include:

· understanding what a complete sentence is

· identifying fragments and run-ons

· learning how to use punctuation around various modifiers

Long-term outcomes (by the end of the semester and beyond) include:

· composing sentences with a variety of modifiers

· avoiding writing fragments and run-ons

· editing their own writing for grammatical correctness

· feeling confident about their sentence construction in all classes and writing situations

6. In what ways will the lesson make learning visible?

Student learning will be visible through their ability to correctly complete exercises, both in their workbooks and on the board, to explain the concepts to other students and to the instructors, and to chart sentences on the board. It will also be demonstrated through the questions that the students ask and the answers they give to questions asked by the instructional assistants.

7. What will the observers be tracking? Be specific.

Observers will track:

What percentage of the students seem actively engaged?

How many students speak up and ask questions?

How many of the students are clearly understanding the concepts, as evidenced by their work on the board and answers to questions?

How many students do not seem to be getting the concepts?

How many students are not prepared for lab (no book, work not done, etc.)?

What sorts of questions do the students ask?

What type of interactions do the students have with each other?

8. What artifacts of student learning and student experience will your team collect?

Questionnaire and video.

9. What excites your team about lesson study? What apprehensions or questions do you have about Lesson Study?

It is exciting to have a chance to observe the labs. We do not often see what occurs in lab, which is such an important component of our course. Also, it will be helpful to really examine our grammar instruction. As a department, we have remained committed to instruction in this area, despite it being a very difficult area to teach because it requires intricate materials that cannot easily be “freshened up” to accommodate changing student needs and interests. It is easy to get stuck in one particular system and not continually develop one’s pedagogy.

This also provides an exciting learning opportunity. The department is, through a collaborative process, developing assignments that intricately link reading with writing skills. These new assignments will be taught in all fall 2009 sections of basic skills other than the pilot, English 102. The team will use its experience conducting a lesson-study in the spring of 2009 to facilitate a larger lesson-study in the fall that focuses on these collaboratively-developed assignments and includes both full and part-time instructors in the studt.

The team members did voice some apprehension as we planned our study. One area of apprehension is how our presence as observers will alter the lab environment, especially for the students. Our presence will be highly conspicuous in a small lab of sixteen students. We also realize that, in studying the labs, we are beginning to analyze and question the department’s approach to teaching grammar. This may shake some core beliefs that have guided curriculum development in the past. Examining our approach to grammar may be thorny and controversial for the department as a whole.

C. Wide-Angle Lens: Focusing on Larger Trends in Institutional Data

1) What data from your Institutional Research Office will you integrate into your Inquiry? For example, will you look at patterns of student success, defined as grades of CR, A,B C? Retention rates (completion of semester without withdrawl)? Persistence from one semester to the next, or from one course to the next in a sequence? Comparisons of student outcomes disaggregated by race/ethnicity, gender, age? Data from surveys on student engagement? For a sample Inquiry using this kind of data, go to http://facultyinquiry.net and look for the category “Using Institutional Research,” then see the Learning Community Impact study posted there.)

Spring 2009

We are conducting surveys at the beginning and end of the semester that will collect information from the nearly six-hundred students who are taking a basic skills course in spring of 2009. The survey that we gave during the third week of classes is designed to help us identify broad, but helpful, categories of student backgrounds, needs, and self-perceptions. For example, we hope to understand how many students fall into the category of Generation 1.5, how many identify has having a disability, how many describe problems with their commutes, how many identify their reading skills as strong or weak.

Toward the end of the semester, we want to survey students’ experience in the class. The early survey includes a student identification number so that we can track their answers from the first survey to the last; we will ask questions about their experience in the course and the lab, about their perceived improvement and readiness for the next class. We will also track individual students’ success in the next course.

In addition to the surveys, we will also request data about retention and persistence as well as patterns of performance in other classes.

2) How do you imagine this data will help you understand the problem/issue you’re investigating? In other words, how does the data connect to and inform the overall focus of your inquiry?

We suspect that the surveys will give us a different lens through which to view the themes that surface in our interviews. The surveys are also a tool that we can use on an on-going basis to collect data over many years, allowing us to compare and contrast student cohorts. We hope that our inquiry will allow us to make more informed decisions when allocating program resources and revising our curriculum. The surveys will be an important source of information since we will get a wide-angle snap shot of who our students are and what they need right now. In addition to helping us be more thoughtful in developing curriculum and allocating resources, we know that describing the students with the help of these kinds of survey results will enable us to advocate for our students more effectively within the institution and beyond.

2) What questions/concerns do you have about this element of your Inquiry? How can your Inquiry Coach support you in this phase of your Inquiry?

We are interested in developing effective and useful data-collecting tools that we will use on an on-going basis. Feedback as to the effectiveness of the tool will be invaluable. Also, we are developing as interpreters of data. We will need guidance with this as well.

D. Video Footage

We are asking each team to collect at least 10 hours of video footage in the Spring semester.

1) Beyond plans detailed above, please describe any additional footage you intend to gather.

As described above, we will video tape as part of the interview and lesson study process. We may also conduct additional interviews to create a short film that will help us orient new faculty and staff and faculty outside of the English department to the themes and issues that arise for English basic skills students.

2) How will this footage inform the central questions of your Inquiry?

This will provide us with the opportunity to ask the questions that emerge in department meetings and in hallways: Why do students drop? What barriers are they facing? How might we better support students’ needs? What can we do to remove roadblocks and help students reach their goals? We know so much by talking with our students and reading their written work. But we often suspect this most vital of data. Videotaping will allow us to collect their voices, challenge our assumptions, and honor the students’ feedback in a formal and rich format that can be used to inform and advocate. The taped interviews and student experience in the classroom will address our central question about students’ needs and our choices.

3) What questions/concerns do you have about this element of your Inquiry? Is there any support you’d like from the FIN Leadership Team in this area?

We haven’t done this before, so we will need to give it a try and see how it goes.

E. Inclusion of Student Voices

As noted during the Kick-Off Convening, an additional $1,000 will be made available to each team to support making student voices a central part of each Inquiry. We encourage you to be creative and draw upon students as co-inquirers who can provide expertise in helping you understand the problem/issue you are investigating. Please describe how you plan to include student voices in your Inquiry (e.g. hiring students to capture video footage, interview other students, review data from your inquiry and tell you what they see).

We are working with mass communications students to make the video. We are also planning to ask the student co-inquirers to conduct the face-to-face interviews. We will work with the two student co-inquirers to formulate the interview questions and analyze the data results. We hope that they can be part of the retreat presentation and the faculty orientation for fall 2009.

Timeline/Calendar

So that we can visualize how the work will proceed over the next several months, please give a timeline for when the above components will occur. It can be in either calendar or outline format.

Creation of English 102 and approval in curriculum: Dec 2008-Feb 2009

Study of Accuplacer: Fall – Spring 2008-9

Early surveys of all basic skills students: Jan – Feb 2009

Analysis of early surveys: March 2009

Interviews of students in 4 identified classes: March – May 2009

Interviews for Video: March – May 2009

Collaborative development of modules: March – April 2009

Plan for embedded counseling in fall 2009 (explain?)

Develop reflection assignment and late-semester survey: March 2009

Give reflection assignment and late-semester survey: May 2009

Request persistence, retention, success data: May – June 2009

Analyze this data: May-June 2009

Present data analysis and plan fall 2009 grant work: June 2009 and August 2009