SPARK MIT Inquiry 2016

Today the 2016 SPARK MIT (Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher) Group met at SPARK Headquarters in Auckland city. We were each given the chance to introduce ourselves and share our inquiry ideas. Quite a few of us have decided to focus on improving student outcomes in writing. However, it was interesting to note that we had different problems that we needed to specifically identify (regarding our group of learners) and share with the group. It was actually a little harder than we thought to actually verbalise what the root of the problem was. This is what I narrowed down to be the problem for the Extension group:

Problem: Only a small number of Pt England Learners are progressing beyond the mean in writing even when they are classified as our more able or 'Extension Children'. 

Hypothesis: These learners appear to be unclear about what is expected of them and do not appear to have clear goals to strive for in order to achieve well above the national standard in writing. 

Evidence: 

Fig 2. (below) is a table of performance in e-asTTle Writing from November 2015 of the Pt England Extension Children.

Year Group	Below Mean	At Mean	Above Mean
Y5	3	1	9
Y6	6		6
Y7	2		8
Y8	1		9

You will note that there are a significant number of learners above the mean but very few of those are actually outside of the ‘box’ that is grouped around the mean of e-asTTle Writing.