Action Research Review

1. What is the title of the project? The title of the project is, "What Happens to Third Graders' Writing When They Participate in a Reading and Letter Writing Program?"

2. What is the problem? The problem identifed by this third grade teacher is the struggle almost all third graders seem to have with language development, including letter formation, spacing of words, and the use of punctuation and capitalization. In her class, specifically, she noticed that her student struggled with all aspects of letter-writing: dialogue, organization, sentence structure, flow, text-connections, vocabulary, mechanics, support from the reading, and making references about themselves.

3. Describe the instructional intervention. This teacher implemented book discussions in the classroom which gave students the opportunity to practice their writing in the form of a pen pal letter writing program. She assessed the letter-writing with a rubric.

4. What kind of strategy is the instructional intervention? The instructional intervention falls into the category of "simulation and games," since students were role-playing a real-life scenario of writing letters to pen pals in another school.

5. What evidence is presented that the strategy will work? Simulations and games also include role-playing scenarios in which students can participate in role-playing as a learning experience in a relatively low-risk environment. This pen pal letter-writing program simulates a real-world experience for students, since letter-writing is an authentic skill. A key research finding states that "Simulations can provide students engaging experiences towards learning crisis-management, communication and problem-solving, data management, and collaboration" (Gredler, 1994).

6. How will data be collected to determine if the strategy will work? The teacher collected and assessed student samples of written letters over a four-month period to determine if the strategy was effective in her classroom.

7. How was the data analyzed? The data was analyzed and assessed using a scoring rubric and rubric guide that the teacher created specifically for this research.

8. What were the results? The results of this action research project were that all students who were randomly selected showed growth in the letter writing process, a decrease in occurrence of errors, and an increase in their level of writing. Students continued, however, to struggle with vocabulary and mechanics.