In order to test my hypothesis, I will be studying fifth grade students placed in a Regular Education Initiative classroom setting. Sixty students in all will be given a word list of basic fifth grade vocabulary. They will be asked to study the list for one week before being tested. A test taken from the Spectrum ISAT Prep series will be administered at the end of one week. All sixty tests will be scored and students will be divided into two groups. Group A will consist of all students scoring a seventy percent or higher. Group B will consist of all students scoring a sixty-nine percent and below. From there, fifteen students from each group will be randomly selected using a computer program. The fifteen randomly selected students who scored a seventy percent or higher will make up the control group, while the other fifteen randomly selected students scoring sixty-nine percent or lower will make up the experimental group.
After the control and experimental group has been established, students in the experimental group will begin learning a variety of learning strategies. The strategies that the experimental group will be exposed to include mnemonics using imagery, KWL charting, and first letter technique. Each technique will be incorporated into daily lessons five days a week for approximately two weeks. At the end of each two-week session, students will be tested on their abilities.
After the initial six weeks of incorporating one of the three study strategies, students will be given a two-week period of using one of the study strategies previously learned to learn a list of vocabulary terms. At this time, the control group will also be given the same list. Each group will be informed that they will be taking another vocabulary test at the end of two weeks. At the end of the two week period, which would be the eighth week in the research design, students will be given another vocabulary test taken from the Spectrum ISAT Test Prep series. Scores of those students who participated in the experimental group will be compared to the entry test and the three tests taken at the end of each two week lesson. The comparison of all five tests will help determine which, if any, study strategy was most successful in learning.
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Good application. One limitation and confounded variable in your design is that if you apply for two weeks each methods to the same students, then might be that the effect of learning using memory strategies will improve your students performance, or that the time goes by in the semester and they mature and know more, or know better how to study.
So, you might have in your results that one method is better than the other but given to other reasons than you would expect.
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