RUNNING HEAD: ACTION RESEARCH PAPER

Zeke Michel
EDU 2150
Action Research
12/03/2015
Salt Lake Community College

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Problem Identification:
I currently work as a paraeducator in a severe and profound special education school. I
started working there in May of last year and have worked in two separate classrooms with two
separate head teachers. While being there I have seen two different types of curriculum being run
with the students. Last years curriculum was very flowy and non-scripted, you could make it
your own and individualize it to your teaching style. It was entitled Unique Learning Systems or
ULS for short. This system was also able to adapt to student progress and teach students on their
academic level in the same group as students with different academic levels. The second
curriculum that I have seen run is Pathways to Literacy or PTL for short. This curriculum is
much more scripted and you are not as able to make it your own, they require you to follow
script at 96% accuracy. Also this curriculum will move up with student progress and teach on
their academic level, but you as a teacher must divide them into their own academic groups. Both
of these curriculums are great in their uniqueness and very effective. However, when I was first
introduced to PTL and told to run it I was skeptical, to say the least, and I wanted to go back to
ULS. I didnt think that running a curriculum that was so scripted would be helpful to the
individual students at all. The people who wrote these things dont know my students like I do,
they wouldnt know how they learn best. I wanted to see which curriculum would best fit a
multicultural classroom. Which leads us to the question, how effective are each of the
curriculums in teaching the students of separate cultures in one classroom?
Plan of Action
I decided that I would collect data on how the students react to the new curriculum. This
data would be based on their engagement, their responses to the curriculum, and their
performance in the curriculum. I will watch 2 different classes with a total of 22 students overall,

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there are 12 Caucasian-American kids, 2 Indian-American kids, 2 Irish American kids, 4

Hispanic-American kids, and 2 African American kids, In total there are 2 female students and
20 male students (this is just the nature of severe disabilities). I will also interview 7 different
staff members who teach in the classes. 5 of which are Caucasian-American and 2 which are
Hispanic-American. I will run the curriculum for 3 weeks and assess at the end of each week. I
will use bar graphs to present my data.
Data Collection
I collected my data based on three separate criteria, the first being student engagement.
Student engagement is whether or not the student is paying attention during the lesson. They
dont necessarily have to be learning it for it to be considered engagement, so long as they are
paying attention to whats going on. I monitored student engagement as well as the other seven
staff members around me who were acting as support staff during the academic groups, each
providing their prospective at the end of the week. We watched for students who were paying
attention and attempting to answer questions when asked. These were the findings:

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Bar graph maker. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2015, from

http://www.rapidtables.com/tools/bar-graph.htm

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The second set of data that I collected was on how students responded to the curriculum,
so whether or not they seemed to enjoy participating in the lessons (for the non-verbal students),
or they verbally said that they enjoyed it. Once again, I had the other seven staff members sit
down and talk with me about whether or not they were under the impression that any of the kids
enjoyed the curriculum, and if so which ones. It seemed like the more we ran the curriculum the
more the students would enjoy participating in it. I found that the other instructors, along with
myself were feeling the same way. These were my findings:

Bar graph maker. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2015, from

http://www.rapidtables.com/tools/bar-graph.htm
The third set of data I collected was on student performance. I collected it based on
whether or not the students were performing at 70% accuracy answering word association
questions from the curriculum. As the students got more used to how the curriculum worked,

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their scores would get higher. The curriculum is extremely repetitive in nature and it made it
much easier for the students to adapt to it and pick up the information taught.

Bar graph maker. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2015, from

http://www.rapidtables.com/tools/bar-graph.htm
The only problem I really ran into while collecting data for this project is that I have no
way of collecting hard data for ULS (Unique Learning Systems) because we no longer run it, so
what I did was I interviewed two teachers who had a lot of experience running it over the last
couple of years. Both of their responses were extremely similar which made it more trustworthy
in how factual it is. Andrew Yawn B.S., E.D. said that With the new system (PTL) of teaching
the students, it is really weird to have it completely scripted however unlike Unique Learning
Systems, Pathways to Literacy cannot be changed and adapted by all the teachers. This way the

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students will go through the same curriculum and build on it for their entire education which will
lead to better outcomes in the future. It wont be effective for the students in the higher grades
right now but as the younger grades come up they will be much better off because they will be
completely adapted to it and build upon the skills as they grow up. Deven Perry M.S., E.D. says
I love the new curriculum, it gives us a way to be more uniform as teachers and use the
curriculum as a way to control the learning of students who have a difficult time as it is.
Teaching students with Autism is hard when you throw an entirely new teacher and teaching
style at them every few years, like it would be with any teaching program; however, this way
they will stick with the same stuff and hopefully in the long run students will be better off.
Having interviewed these two I have an understanding of how the new curriculum compares to
the old.
Analysis of Data
The data that I collected has shown me that the new curriculum has the potential to be
better at teaching students of multiple cultures than the old curriculum. As we used the
curriculum further we discovered that the students liked it even more and it was easier for them
to get into it. The students also seemed to enjoy it better than the old curriculum because it
involves the use of a frog puppet who reads stories to them. It made the learning more real to
them because it was a physical object that they could see. This went over extremely well with the
Irish-American, Hispanic-American, and African-American students. I am unsure of the exact
reason but most of them seemed to extremely enjoy the use of the hand puppet in the academic
groups.
The first set of data I wanted to talk about is the student engagement data. I saw a spike in
engagement in week 3 amongst most of the cultures, the only one that declined was the

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Caucasian students which only declined by 1. The reason for this spike in engagement is because
the students started to enjoy the curriculum most that week. They started to finally understand
what it was asking of them and how they were supposed to answer the questions using word
association. As you can see there is also a spike in the other two graphs on this week as well. The
students were finally starting to perform well also.
What I have found is that the students were responding really well to the change in
curriculum. They really enjoyed learning to read sight words and follow along while Moe (the
frog puppet) reads the story. This is an effective and more uniform style of teaching, it unifies the
education of kids with severe disabilities.
Plan of Action
Based on what I have seen in my data collection and from observing the kids outside of
the collection process I have decided that PTL will be more effective than ULS was after it has
been given a couple of years to be implemented for the younger students. Because the older
students who are being introduced to the new curriculum are so far into their education and
reading programs, they can only benefit so much from the new system. These are the students
that I worked with on this project. The younger students will benefit more because their
education system will be more consistent through their school years.
Because of this research my classroom has started running the good things from both
systems. We have done this because it benefits the older students in my class to continue using
ULS because it is the system that they are all used to and it is better for them to stick with the
things that they already know and build on that knowledge rather than starting completely over at
their age. We are still using PTL however because the students enjoy it and it is a really good

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program for learning sight words. The only problem with it is whether or not the information will
last with the students. The students also seem to really enjoy the fact that there is a puppet
involved.
Leading me into my next discovery which is that in my classroom when I become
certified, due to this project I have decided that I will try and incorporate puppets and animals
into all other forms of curriculum instead of just reading. For example when we learn about math
I will perhaps use hand puppets to help engage the students more. This being because throughout
multiple cultures I have seen a trend that they love to have a non-authoritative figure talk to them
and help guide them through the learning process. This would be a good way of teaching to
multiple cultures because it hits more than just one or two of them. It includes all of the students
in an interactive way in which they learn best.
References:
Bar graph maker. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2015, from
http://www.rapidtables.com/tools/bar-graph.htm