MAED6163 - 6th Article

Reflection 6

The action research I read is called “Algebra in the Fifth Grade Mathematics Program”, which is written by Kathy Bohac studied in University of Nebraska – Lincoln. And I would like to focus on his “Purpose Statement” and “Method” provided by Dr. Ng.

At the very beginning, he mentioned the intent of his study was to find if his students could solve equations. But the data collected (what he did in the research) was not exactly what he was intended to do. I suggest he should be specific that he was doing a research about the effectiveness of using the Hands-On Equation program.

Moreover, his first research question “what happens to my teaching when I enhance my fifth grade mathematics instruction to include more algebraic concepts?” is difficult to measure. Asking students’ opinions will have bias result easily. Moreover, how can students know what he meant about “more” because he has taught this topic for several years but for the students, that was the first time to reach the topic. The third question “what happens to student understanding of algebraic concepts when I increase the amount of algebraic concepts studied in fifth grade mathematics?” also has the same problem since students did not learn this before and did not “feel” the increase of the amount.

Therefore, I suggest he should collect the data from other classes that was taught by him but keep same amount of algebraic concepts. Otherwise, through survey, interview, pre-test and post-test of same group of students did not help in his research. Post-test result must be better than pre-test since they learnt seven more lesson.

On the other hand, he mentioned about “due to the snow day and student absences, this turned out to be a good number of lessons to have”. And also in the method part, he mentioned about “Everything from this project was collected, separated and filled in individual student folders… I also kept a calendar with the dates of each event throughout the entire research project.” I am not sure if what he wrote was useful to his research. The progress of how he kept the data was not relevant / does not affect the result of research. Instead of focusing on how to keep the data, I suggest he should focus more on what kinds of students he chose, how he carried out the interview, or how he collected data.

Last but not least, about the appendix, there are few suggestions. For example, the challenging questions from “junior high algebra textbooks” (appendix D) should not be that easy (even easier than pre-test, post-test and hands on equations), the interview questions are too difficult (e.g. what is algebra?) for fifth grade students (10~11 years old) to answer. I suggest he can revise those materials so that the data collected is more precise and useful.

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