Action Plan to Push More Students to Exceed in Reading and Language Arts

At M. Agnes Jones Elementary, the 5TH grade goals are to push more students to exceed in Reading and Language Arts, have a higher percentage of the students receiving a score of 3 or better on the Georgia Writing Test, and have at least 50 percent gains in the areas of social studies and science. Though these subjects seem unrelated, they are linked because of the need for the students to be able to demonstrate their understanding of the subject through their comprehension skills and their articulation of their understanding through the written word. As a teacher with more of a mathematical and sociological background, I feel inept in my ability to teach my students reading and writing. This problem has been compounded by many of my students scoring in the “At-risk” and “Intervention” percentile on last year’s CRCT. This issue became critical when the scores from the computer adaptive test were release, and my student’s met 50 percent of their “I Can” goals in math but only 30 percent of their “I Can” goals in reading. Therefore to rectify this deficiency on my part, my research question is “What strategies can I implement to increase my students’ ability in reading comprehension, fluency, and decoding?” Through the use of homogenous flexible grouping, integration across the curriculum, and intensive technology usage, I plan to conduct the research and implement the experimental strategies involving teaching reading comprehension, fluency, and decoding. Furthermore, I plan to utilize a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research to observe the gains my students have made.
Literature Review
To ensure the teaching strategies being implemented in my class are considered best practice amongst researchers, I have included an ana...

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...ass of 14 fifth grade students, there are 3 students that have been recommended for Gifted and Challenge, 5 students recommended for early intervention program (EIP), 1 student recommended for pre-service for special services in behavior and academics (SST). All the students in room 211 are of African American descant.
Through the observation of student work, writing journals, portfolios, and students’ interviews, I will have a qualitative understanding of my students’ gains implementing the strategies taught. However, I will be employing the results from the computer adaptive test, which is given three times a year, to have a quantitative and unbiased understanding of my students’ gain. This data will be collected until March of 2014, so I can predict how the students might perform on the CRCT and the Georgia Writing Test, which both are given in the month of March.