Active Research Challenges

Since my action research will study the special education students’ TAKS scores and their achievement gaps, I will need the active participation of all the third, fourth and fifth grade teachers, along with the special education staff. The most important challenge that I foresee is that throughout the school year, teachers will need to complete specific forms to report their students’ benchmark scores and note their performance on each of the TAKS objectives. This activity will require the teachers to analyze data and submit the completed forms at the beginning of the school year and after the administration of each benchmark that their students take. Since this practice is not required by the district, I will need to convince them of the importance of the study by explaining that the results that we get will benefit the entire campus. Also, since I will be analyzing and evaluating the results of each class, I plan on informing them about my evaluation during grade level meetings. This will make their job easier and their teaching more effective, because they will know the areas that they need to focus, utilizing new strategies, applying remediation tools, resulting on the reduction of the achievement gap and the improvement their scores. With the support of the administration, and my active monitoring and assistance to the teachers, I believe that the challenges will be minimized.