Rolling Along with My Action Research Plan (Progress Update)

As a reminder, by action research is researching the effectiveness of the use of student science journals towards student achievement. My action research plan is moving at a slower pace than my internship plan. I have logged many hours into my internship plan hoping to put it on the back burner, so that I could concentrate on my action research plan this summer. I am currently gathering the necessary data to complete my research. I want to do this while school is going on, so that if I run into a problem, I have the support of my school staff and administrators to help me. As I gather the data, I am formatting it into charts and graphs where the data can easily be compared. This summer, I will apply this data to my action research paper. I have established the selection of the bilingual and monolingual students that I will use in my research. I have already gathered the district benchmarks in science for the participating students from the school year 2011-2012. I have gathered the district benchmarks in science for this year 2012-2013 and am up to date with those results. I have copied the organizational skills used in the students science journals and will continue to gather more samples from this year towards the end of the year. I am researching on the web trying to find as much research as I can that pertains to my action research. I have found several good sources like foss.org and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) as a couple of examples. The NSTA has some great articles concerning the use of science notebooks and has documented some of the research that has been developed to study the use of the science notebooks. I have not ran into any obstacles yet, but I know that if I do, I can rely on my administrators, the staff and the professors to redirect me in the right direction.