EDLD 5326 Action Research Update

My action research project is based on my schools 1:1 iPad initiative.  We start an Academic Leadership Academy (ALA) with 50 incoming freshmen students.  Each student was given an iPad to use.  The plan was to begin the iPad initiative with these 50 students and then after two years expand the program to include all high school students.  I choose to research the impact the iPads had on student achievement. 

I began by observing the ALA classes to see how students in class were using the iPads.  What I found was that most teachers were not integrating iPad use into their lessons.  After discussing the issue with my principal we decided to offer training workshops to the teachers to teach them how to integrate the iPads into their curriculum.  I held a series of training workshops for our teachers last spring and a couple of refresher workshops in August.  I again observed the ALA classes to see how students were using the iPads and was pleased to see mush more integration of the iPads into the daily classes. 

The next thing I did was pull the MAP testing data from May, September, and January for the ALA students in Math and Reading.  I then pulled the MAP testing data from May, September, and January for students in non ALA sections of honors math, honors English, and AP Human Geography.  When I compared the data on student achievement I noticed that the two groups of students had very similar scores for the May and September MAP administration; however the ALA group of students had scores that were an average of 11% higher than the non ALA group for the January MAP administration.