Notes on revisions made prior to formative evaluations:
After reviewing Chapter 10 (Dick & Carey, 2015) again and discussing with my students, I decided to eliminate the instructor-led option to the instruction (including the human sentence activity that gave me time constraint concerns) and have turned my materials into a course on Schoology that can be completed entirely by the student alone. To replace the human sentence practice activity and ensure enough practice occurs, I added two quizzes for each half of the instruction: independent clauses and dependent clauses. This instruction can be used as a “virtual snow day,” an emergency sub lesson, or for a flipped classroom. I then applied the formative evaluation process to that Schoology version of the materials as follows:
Formative Evaluation Plan
One-to-one Plan:
1st – English IV AP teacher, both instructor and subject-matter-expert
I will send my course information to the English teacher so that he can walk through the instruction himself, taking notes on the accuracy and clarity of the instruction, as well as ensuring that links and videos are functioning.
2nd – Academic Decathlon student, target learner, preAP student
I will have my Academic Decathlon student go through the instruction, giving me immediate feedback on the clarity, impact, and feasibility of the lesson. This will take place during the Academic Decathlon study hall period at the end of the school day. The class period is 45 minutes, so the instruction will continue into the next day, including a 15-20 minute debrief session when the student has completed the instruction.
3rd – Academic Decathlon student, target learner, English Language Learner
*same as 2nd evaluator on a different day
Small Group Plan:
I am in a unique position because my school has what we call Eagle Time, a built-in RTI period before lunch, giving me the perfect opportunity to try out the instruction with a small group. We are able to choose two lists of students: Eagle White students come on Mondays and Tuesdays, and Eagle Green students come on Thursdays and Fridays (when the week is on a regular schedule). As the English I STAAR has already passed but the Algebra and Biology STAARs are upcoming, those tested classes get first choice of students, so my Eagle students aren’t chosen based on data anymore so much as just my students that weren’t picked by one of their other teachers. This does still however create a diverse sampling of learners from all of my English I classes. I have 13 students on each list; however, they don’t all show up (many students skip during this period).
Questions for students:
- Was the instruction clear?
- Was the instruction easy to follow?
- Was the instruction too easy or too difficult?
- Do you feel that you learned anything from the instruction?
- Were the videos interesting enough?
- Were the videos informative enough?
- Did anything feel like “busywork”?
- Were there enough examples?
- Did the practice activities help? Too easy? Too difficult?
One-to-One Evaluations
Description of who served as one-to-one evaluators and why they were chosen
PreAP English II student: This student is an example from the high achieving end of the range. She is good example of a student who has heard the terms and language before but does not remember the specifics of the instruction. The instruction would serve more as a refresher and extension of what the student already knows.
English Language Learner student: This student is an example from the struggling end of the range. She has some English language difficulties and is more in need of the instruction than the preAP student. The added supports in the instruction are more geared to her level.
English IV AP teacher: This teacher knows the English content very well and can ensure that all information and examples are correct, both in the instruction I created and in the videos I chose. He was also able to run through the instruction as a student before showing it to the other students to ensure that everything appears the way intended.
Length of the one-to-one meetings
PreAP student and ELL student: Two class periods on consecutive days, 45 minutes each (including debrief interview)
English IV AP teacher: 45 minutes after school
Description of the activities done during the one-to-one meetings
Students used access code to enter the course on Schoology. Students worked through the instruction in front of me, providing feedback and asking questions. I was able to make some immediate changes (clarifying that the Welcome Page is where students are to start) and fix issues with the YouTube videos in the PowerPoint.
The English teacher looked over instruction and provided feedback and a description of how the instruction looked from the student view. He helped me experiment with the Student Completion features before ultimately deciding not to use them for the one-to-one evaluations. I did decide to use them on one of the small groups, as described below.
Remarks on how long it took the evaluators to complete the activities
My estimation of an hour was very accurate. Including the time it took to enter the access code, students spent all of one 45-minute class period and about 15 minutes of the next class period to complete the activities and notes. The preAP student finished quicker because she chose not to watch some of the videos for the steps she understood from the notes alone.
Results of the assessments that evaluators completed
Independent clause Quizizz:
Both the preAP student and the ELL student scored high, 10/10 and 9/10
Dependent clause Quizizz:
Both the preAP student and the ELL student scored high, 10/10 and 8/10
Independent Clauses and the Sentences They Make Quiz:
The preAP student scored 100 on the first attempt, and the ELL scored 80 on the first attempt.
Dependent Clauses and the Sentences They Make Quiz:
The preAP student scored 80 on the first attempt and 100 on the second, and the ELL scored 90 on the first attempt.
Feedback received from the evaluators during these sessions
Both students were adamant that they preferred this method of instruction over the typical teacher-led, students-take-notes style of instruction. They both agreed that teacher-led notes are boring (no engagement) and take much longer. Completing the instruction individually gave them the option to watch the videos they needed and skip the ones they didn’t. The preAP student only watched the instructional videos when she felt she needed the additional information. The ELL student watched all of the videos. They both enjoyed the videos they watched. They appreciated their short length, but felt they still conveyed the information well.
The preAP student did not immediately identify the instruction as too easy but agreed that was definitely very easy when questioned about it. The ELL student found the difficulty level perfect. The practice assignments were easy where they were placed in the instruction and helped the students understand the concepts and feel confident moving forward in the instruction.
Description of revisions that could be made to instruction based on feedback
As the students worked and provided feedback, I made some adjustments. First, I clarified where they were to start. I had assumed that they would immediately start at the Welcome page, but they all asked, so I added “START HERE” to the Welcome page’s title. They all chose to download the PowerPoint, but the embedded videos did not work when downloaded. I deleted the embedded videos and just put the YouTube links that students could click on. There was some confusion about the sentence examples in the notes, so I added instructions to clarify that sentence examples were meant to be created by the student, not copied from the slides.
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Formative Evaluations – One-to-One
Mrs. Hebert's Classroom 