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The resources in this bibliography are resources that I found to help me with an action research project that I would like to complete that would look at how student comprehension and retention would change if the students were involved in creating and maintaining a Wall of Enduring Understandings throughout each unit, and throughout the course.

I have split the resources into three categories. The first category addresses what happens when students are made to feel that they are more a part of the creation of the learning space, in terms of physical, psychological and emotional aspects of that learning space. The second category contains resources that give information and research about educational approaches that are concept-based, rather than the more traditional content-based approach. The final category contains resources that provide research and information on a classroom tools known as a Word Wall and KWLs. I blended these two tools to create the idea for my Wall of Enduring Understandings.

Branch, Myra, Grafelman, Brenda, & Hurelbrink, Kurt. (1998). Increasing student ownership

and responsibility through the collaborative assessment process. Published. Master of

Arts in Teaching and Leadership. Thesis: Saint Xavier University and Skylight Training

This Masters thesis discusses the research conducted to see the effects of bringing students into the process of developing and delivering assessments. The authors outline the process used, and how the research was conducted. The research was carried out in a classroom, and a combination of qualitative and quantitative data was used to support their thesis. Their conclusion is that allowing students to work with teachers to develop assessments gives the students a greater sense of ownership, and therefore a greater sense of responsibility about their educational process. This greater sense of responsibility results in increased learning effort, and subsequently improved performance on assessments.

This thesis helped to shape the portion of my proposal that requires the students to decide, for themselves, what the Enduring Understandings for each unit should be. Rather than having me, the teacher, force Enduring Understandings on them, and thus giving them an excuse for rejected the entire kit and caboodle (“That’s what the teacher wants me to learn; that doesn’t have anything to do with me.”), the student is drawn into the process, and thus is put in a position of having to defend the process, or reject his/her own work. Since this is a thesis, it is a fairly long document, but much of it is actual examples of the work they produced and used in the classroom, so is useful in fully understanding their approach.

Ennis, Catherine D. & McCauley, M. Terri. Creating urban classroom communities worthy of

This article discusses the fact that urban classrooms are often places where the students are marginalized, or worse, actively rejected as individuals. The authors illustrate the negative results of this marginalization, which are the students’ rejection of the classroom, and of education as a whole entity. They go on to discuss how including the students in the creation of the classroom environment, language, and goal-setting helps the students to feel more accepted in the educational space, and thus are more responsive to the educational process. They further state that it is important for this process to be authentic, because any whiff of falseness or even of patronizing will be met with skepticism and have the same result as active marginalization.

I see this each day in the urban school in which I teach. The teachers that truly care about the students, as individuals, and make clear that the students are the classroom, have much more success than those teachers who constantly mock the way the students talk, or approach a learning task. It seems to me to be common sense, but since there are still teachers who fit the negative paradigm, I suppose it is not.

Katz, Marlene. (1996). Teaching Organic Chemistry via Student-Directed Learning. Journal of

The author of this article looks at the effect of having students decide what they would like to learn about in an organic chemistry class. What she found was that the students were much more involved in the topics, and much more likely to retain the information that was learned.

This supports my belief that, in my proposed study, my students will be more likely to retain the information learned if they are directing their own studies. However, I am concerned that in this age of standardized testing and NCLB allowing students too much freedom in deciding the topics may result in them not learning some content that they will surely be tested on in some high-stakes test. The author has some good ideas, but would they work in every school?

Blank, Lisa M. (1999). A Metacognitive Learning Cycle: A Better Warranty for Student

This article looks at increased retention rates as a result of having students think and talk about their learning process. The author requires the students to write about and discuss their understanding of various topics and their learning process. As a result students showed increased retention.

Metacognition is a tool that is effective in literacy, as well. Having students talk about and write about their reading process forces them to examine how they read. This examination reveals to them what works for them, and what doesn’t. It makes sense that this would hold true when asking students to write about and think about their learning process. As a result, I included this aspect in my research proposal. The students would be required to map their learning for each unit by looking at what they know at the start of the unit, and looking at how that changes as the unit progresses.

Clark, Linda. (2005). Gifted and Growing. Educational Leadership, vol?, 56-60.

This article looks primarily at the negative results of teaching Mentally Gifted students through fact-based, rather than concept-based approaches. The author states that this segment of students learns less and retains less when forced to merely memorize facts. On the other hand, when asked to learn and apply concepts, the students were more likely to remain interested, were more likely to learn the concept, and more likely to retain the information.

Even though this article was about MG students, I think that this could apply to any student. The more interested they are, the more likely they will stay tuned in. Memorizing unrelated facts is not interesting to anyone. Learning concepts that can be applied to a variety of situations is much more useful.

Leonard, William J., Gerace, William J., & Dufresne, Robert J. Department of Physics &

Astronomy and Scientific Reasoning Research Institute. (1999). Concept-Based Problem

Solving: Making concepts the language of physics. Amherst, Massachusetts: University

This organization is encouraging the use of concept-based problem solving to increase the understanding and retention in physics classes. They give examples of what this would look like, as well as research on the result of using this approach.

Even though this was looking at physics classrooms, I think this has applicability to the chemistry classroom, as well. Chemistry and physics concepts can have the same type of abstraction, and students have equal difficulty with these subjects. Further, given the abstract nature of the concepts, the related individual facts can be incomprehensible to students. As a result, students are often turned off from the start. Approaching it in this way could be more likely to keep the students involved in puzzling through towards understanding.

Orkwiszewski. (2006). Moving from didactic to inquiry-based instruction. The American

The author of this article looks at the effect of using broad concepts, rather than individual facts in science instruction. In addition, the author looks at how learning changes when the students learn through inquiry, rather than through teacher-led instruction. The author finds that students are more invested in, more interested in and more likely to retain the knowledge gained when inquiry-based approaches are used.

I have been finding this to be true, myself. I have recently begun to teach my environmental science class almost exclusively through the use of inquiry-based projects. The students are much more attentive to the topic than if I were to lecture, and I am hearing them come to class much more often, saying that they were watching a show on t.v. about the topic they’re researching, or heard on the radio someone talking about that topic. I hardly ever heard students say that when I used a heavily lecture-based approach.

Brabham, Edna Green & Villaume, Susan Kidd. (2001). Building Walls of Words. The Reading

This is a straight-forward primer on how and why to use word walls. Word walls are simply areas of the room with lists of words or cards with individual words/terms written on them. The teacher then refers to the word wall when using the terms, and each time a new term is introduced it goes to the word wall. This provides a visual support for improving literacy.

I use word walls in my classroom, and they are very helpful. The majority of our students fall heavily towards the visual end of the visual/auditory learning spectrum, so being able to see the word on the wall, and have me refer to it on a regular basis helps them to fix the term in their memories. This article is a clear and easy to use guide for anyone who would like to try to start using word walls.

Schoenbach, Ruth, Greenleaf, Cynthia, Cziko Christine and Hurwitz, Lori. (1999). Reading for

Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms: West Ed, San Francisco.

This book provides strategies and an outline for a program for teaching academic literacy to middle school and high school students. The authors suggest that learning how to read academic text is like learning a different language, and that students need to be explicitly taught that reading an academic text is different from reading leisure text, and explicitly taught the skill of reading academic texts. The authors tested and tuned the strategies in their classrooms in a California public school district.

I am a big fan of this book, and it is one of the books that led me into my interest in developing cross-content literacy. In addition to giving instructions and suggestions about word walls and KWL strategies, it gives a host of other techniques that I have tried, with a great amount of success, in both my English classes and my science classes.

Szabo, Susan. (2006). KWHHL: A student-driven evolution of the KWL. American Secondary

The KWL (What I Know; What I Want to Know; What I Learned) strategy has been around for a while. Szabo expands KWL so that it becomes more student-driven by adding HH (Head Words, Heart Words). Head Words are words that the student indicates are confusing, and Heart Words are words that indicate what the material makes him/her feel. She also has her students complete the KWHHL to get them to track and guide their own learning. After trying the expanded technique in her classroom, she concludes that her students were more invested in learning the different topics, and were doing better on her assessments. She states that she would like to look at whether this technique would be as successful with non-struggling readers.

While the idea of Heart Words still seems a little strange to me, the idea of having the students tracking their own learning process is very important to what I am interested in incorporating with the Wall of Enduring Understandings. I am interested to find out if I get similar results, in terms of increased student efficacy and ownership. Otherwise, this is a very clear and useful description of how to use KWLs (or in this case, KWHHLs as a way of increasing student involvement in the learning process.

Vallejo provides a short and concise description of how and why he uses word walls in his science content classroom. He gives clear and instructions and a reasoned rationale.

For a quick and dirty description of how to use word walls in the science classroom, this is a great resource. If you are interested in trying this strategy, and all you need is the how-to, use this article.