Week 12

Essential Question: How will I demonstrate impact on student learning as a result of my differentiated lesson?

In order to demonstrate impact on student learning, I decided to give my students a pre and post project survey.  Since my digital storytelling project includes multiple components, quizzes and tests would not be a very easy way to assess impact.  The survey I created for them asks questions about how familiar they are with various aspects of digital storytelling, such as elements of a story, (characters, setting, POV, conflict, rising action, etc.).  I also asked them questions about how to create story tables, creating or choosing images, music and narration to create mood and tone, and the use of iMovie to put everything together.  In the questions I asked the choices I gave them were worded as, "Yes, I can explain how to do this", or "No I don't know how to do this". I wanted to word them this way rather than just allowing them to say yes or know.  I've found that when you ask students if they know something well enough to explain it, they are often more honest with themselves (and me) about their comfort level with that knowledge.  The questions I asked are about specific aspects of the project that are the focus of teaching and learning.

Here is a snapshot of what my part of my survey looks like (I used Survey Monkey and posted the link on our class site). 

Here are the results of my pre-project survey: 

My own personal take on these survey results is that some of the "yes" answers were just the result of a little over-confidence.  I've had these students in class all year, and have had some in previous years as well.  There are a handful of 8th graders in the class who might be able to do some of these things with confidence, but I very much doubt it for the rest of the class.

For example, on the question about "mood" (#4) fully 70% of my students said they could identify and explain mood in a story.  However, today in class we specifically focused on mood in their drafts through a series of exercises, and initially, the majority of them were unable to explain to me what the mood of their story was, or if they had planned dialogue, descriptions, and action verbs to highlight this mood. That question was the only one in which the majority of the students answered over-confidently.  However, because it was so skewed, it confirmed for me that even though all of the other questions show the majority of the students are unclear about most of these ideas, those answering in the affirmative are probably somewhat over-confident about their abilities.

Also, I've updated my final project rubric for students - here is the link to the project on our class site - on the table of contents just click final project rubric.