Action Research

My current action research project for the MEd program centers on critical thinking.  I would like to know if implementing critical thinking will increase my students retention and understanding of our geometry concepts.  I have researched and found many different opinions about what critical thinking actually is and found methods of implementing it into my classroom.

For my project, I am going to teach strategies on critical thinking and then give my students a higher-cognitive level question each day for one chapter.  I will then take data on how my students scored on the problems, a survey about their opinions on the benefits of critical thinking, and an analysis of their previous test scores compared to the current test scores.

On Monday we will be starting the chapter where we will implement the critical thinking.  So far, I have not had too many challenges with this topic, but I do have a few worries.  I am going to be adding something to my lesson plan each day and I want to give my students adequate time to think about the question, but also get in the lesson and practice that they need.  So, time management might be a problem and I may have to change things around if needed.  Also, when researching, many authors discussed the fact that it is difficult to assess a student's ability to think critically, so this may skew my data.  I am excited to get started with my implementation plan.  I'm sure the research won't go exactly as planned, but I am interested to see what happens and analyze the results.