What is being researched?

Over the past few years, Buffalo Elementary (psuedonym) teachers have identified a disconnect in the writing instruction across all grade levels.  Teachers have expressed concern and frustration with the quality of student writing and a need to create a school-wide writing program that can be used across the building.  In order to meet this need, our Instructional Practices Committee has been working to find writing strategies that can be taught to students in kindergarten and built upon each year so that students in fifth grade can use them as well.  We easily decided on a program to use for simple sentence writing that can be turned into paragraphs and finally full essays.  Teachers saw good progress in student writing and that program seems to be working well. 

Unfortunately, our 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers have determined that we still need a strategy that could be used to help students when answering an extended-response question.  Teachers expressed frustration with student work and determined that students didn't have the skills necessary to earn full credit on these types of questions.  Our biggest concern with this is that extended-response questions are a big part of the standarized tests that are given at the end of the year.  We know are teachers are teaching the content and skills needed for students to understand the questions, but their delivery of the answer is not clear enough to earn full credit.  After much research and discussion our teachers decided to use RAP (read/restate the question, answer all parts, and prove your answer) method.  This research project will center around the effectiveness of the RAP method.  More on who will participate will come shortly.

What exactly is the RAP method?

After examining several attack strategies, our teachers decided the RAP method would be the best approach to use school-wide to help students learn how to respond to an extended-response question. The acronym RAP stands for simple steps to help students include all information necessary to completely answer any extended-response question.

            R- Read/Restate- Students should read all parts of the question.  While reading, students should underline the question, box any key words, and circle any important numbers.  Then they will restate the question using the key words.
           

           A- Answer All Parts- Students should fully answer all parts of the question based   on the key words and numbers identified in “R”.

            P- Prove - Students should prove their answer using information from the passage 

and/or by connecting to the text with a personal experience.

This simple framework can be applied to any type of extended-response question. It is an easy mnemonic that helps students remember the best way to approach the question and demonstrate full understanding of the content without leaving out important information. The steps under “R” require students to underline the question and identify key words so that they are focusing on what task(s) they must complete. By circling important numbers students will know what “all” parts of the question are and what must be done to receive full credit for their answer. “Proving” their answer demonstrates full understanding of the concept and requires students to find a way to relate with the text which deepens their understanding.

Who and How?

In order to examine the effects of using the RAP method as an attack strategy for responding to an extended-response question, I turned to the students who earned a novice on the Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) test during the 2012-2013 school year. Novice is the lowest rating a student could have earned on this type of test. Scores increased to apprentice, proficient, and finally distinguished based on the quality and accuracy of the work by the student. The fifth graders from last year have been promoted to middle school so the current fourth and fifth graders that received a novice during third and fourth grade created the group. For lack of a better term, all participants will be referred to as novice students. These students were chosen in order to have a manageable project and because there are a variety of student abilities in the classroom within this group and their different levels will allow for a larger view of the effects of the RAP method.

Within this group of novice students, every student was identified in one or more gap groups. Sixty percent of the novice students were identified as special education students and have an individualized education plan in speech, reading, writing, and/or mathematics. Two participants were of Asian ethnicity, but were not considered to be part of the gap group for ethnicity. All other students were white/Caucasian. 48.5 % of the school received free or reduced lunch. Sixteen of twenty-four students were males with just eight females.

The RAP method will be taught within the students’ regular reading class. Extended- response questions will be created based on the Common Core Standards being taught that week. Teachers will guide students on how to apply RAP to an extended-response question and data will be collected based on student response questions on reading tests using the RAP rubric.  Interviews with the participants will be conducted in another classroom in either small group or individual settings.  (More on data collection to come in a later blog.)