Big Idea: With both differentiation and access supports in hand, I transition my students towards intellectual autonomy and evaluate their progress by performing a case study analysis on a student work sample. I use the literature to attribute my students' impressive new levels of intellectual autonomy back to my differentiation and access supports.
Roadmap:
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Background
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Data Analysis
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Connection to Literature
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Reflection and Next Steps
References: McCombs (2010), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2021)
Background
Key Idea: I decided to analyze an average student's independent project to do a comprehensive deep dive on the effects of differentiation and access supports on my students' autonomous learning, application, and creation of math knowledge.
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During Phase 3 of my inquiry research, I began to incorporate more and more supports that helped students gain broader and more effective access to a variety of knowledge, resources, and materials. We went over the layout of the classroom’s storage space, how to find information within the building, and how to search for information online (see Artifact 6). Alongside this access support, I continue to utilize the differentiation supports from Phase 2. More specifically, my lessons continue to involve student choice, including a variety of ways to approach different tasks and assignments.
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To end Phase 3, I wanted to collect an artifact that would help me see how my students’ intellectual autonomy in knowledge acquisition, application, and creation has advanced. To that end, I designed a project that would incorporate both differentiation and access while engaging all three of the autonomy skills. More specifically, my students were tasked with analyzing any topic that interested them. The project was very open-ended; they were free to choose the topic, how they researched it, how they analyzed it, and how they presented it. The goal was to gauge whether or not they would be successful in leveraging both their intrinsic motivation and intellectual autonomy to learn more about something important to them.
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Although I collected a multitude of projects, I decided to focus this artifact on just one of them. Since the project is so open-ended, there is a lot to discuss; I would rather ensure that I analyze a single product in its entirety, rather than only touching the surface of a large number of them. I chose what I deemed to be a middling project: one that was mostly representative of the average student’s project, in terms of scope, depth, and evidence of autonomy. By doing so, I can extrapolate any findings to the rest of my class, keeping in mind that there are still variations between students.
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Data Analysis
Key Idea: My student's project shows clear indicators of intellectual autonomy, including evidence of autonomous learning, application, and creation of math knowledge.
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At first glance, I can immediately tell that this student was very interested in the topic they chose, and very motivated to create their presentation. Ocean pollution is not one of the real-world topics we have discussed in class, so they pulled a topic that they found personally interesting, rather than reusing something they were already familiar with. The presentation is both informative and aesthetic, which shows both a deep interest in the subject matter and intrinsic motivation to create a polished final product.
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The second slide is especially interesting, because it explains why the student chose the topic. Their interest level is apparent here, especially with the strong wording and exclamatory text. The slide shows a lot of evidence of autonomous learning; none of these facts were ever discussed in class, so they found it all on their own. Furthermore, the research is quite specific, referencing details, examples, and statistics.
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On the third and fourth slides, I see that the student was able to autonomously discover data that interested them, before autonomously creating a graph using that data. The fifth slide shows evidence of autonomous application, during which the student uses the data to draw both statistical and probabilistic conclusions about their topic. In fact, their probabilistic conclusion even points towards further learning goals, which serves as a positive feedback loop for future autonomous learning, application, and creation.
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I am overall impressed by the scope and depth of this student’s project. They are clearly passionate about their topic and willing to go above and beyond in researching it. They applied rigorous statistical and probabilistic methods to the topic, which is completely in line with the standards of the course. This project is evidence that students can indeed drive their own education if they are sufficiently motivated to do so. Teachers do not need to be distributors of knowledge, and can rather delegate the discovery and creation of knowledge to the students themselves.
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Connection to Literature
Key Idea: Drawing on McCombs (2010) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2021), I am able to attribute my students' impressive intellectual autonomy to the specific differentiation and access supports that I provided throughout my inquiry research.
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While this artifact demonstrates a large amount of intellectual autonomy, it is important to remember the goal of my inquiry – figuring out the extent to which that autonomy was a result of the differentiation and access I provided my students. To do so, I will need to turn once again to the literature. According to McCombs (2010), evidence of autonomy and responsibility are signals that a student had meaningful choices, was able to engage their personal interests, and leveraged their curiosity. Since this student was able to choose and research a topic that they were passionate about, they were able to take responsibility for their learning and autonomously produce their final product. In other words, the access that I provided for this student was sufficient to spur on their information-seeking capabilities, which in turn led to autonomous creation.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2021), or CDC, is able to provide another lens into the student’s autonomy. The CDC states that student autonomy and empowerment, evidenced by increased engagement, is often a result of flexibility in how students choose to complete assignments. In other words, differentiation by process can have a direct impact on how much a student feels they have intellectual autonomy. We see that to be the case for my specific student. They chose to use a slide deck to ultimately present their findings, which is clearly a medium that they are both comfortable with and excited to use. They took their time to beautify the presentation by adding images and a matching background, which demonstrates that the process-level differentiation I provided lent itself to increased motivation, and thus increased intellectual autonomy.
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Thus, I have discovered that not only has this particular student experienced an increase in intellectual autonomy, but that increase is very likely rooted in the increased levels of differentiation and access that I was able to provide over the course of my inquiry. By analyzing one specific student’s work in writing, I have been able to zoom in on all the ways that my strategies have been able to increase intellectual autonomy, which extrapolates, at least to some extent, to the other students in my classroom.
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Reflection and Next Steps
Key Idea: This artifact has shown me how effective differentiation and access supports are in transitioning my students to intellectual autonomy, and the next step is to wrap up my inquiry by collecting some final pieces of data that will help me evaluate my research as a whole.
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With the analysis of that culminating project, I have reached the end of Phase 3 of my inquiry research. In Phase 1, I found that I needed to provide some form of differentiation in order to foster intellectual autonomy in my students. In Phase 2, I found that although differentiation did indeed result in increased autonomy, there was still a missing piece of students having sufficient access to the resources and materials they need. In Phase 3, it appears as though a combination of both differentiation and access goes a long way towards fostering intellectual autonomy in my students.
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The last phase of my planned research, the post-phase, focuses on gathering some final data that I can use to summarize the entire inquiry and explore next steps. At this point, there are three potential next steps that I can explore during the post-phase. First, I can try to find an approach that lets me measure, in some way, the improvement of my students’ intellectual autonomy from the start of the inquiry to now. Second, I can look for additional approaches, beyond differentiation and access, that might similarly result in increased intellectual autonomy. Finally, I can review the literature to check for potential pitfalls or shortcomings in my research, before finding a way to address them for my future classroom. All in all, I am happy with where my research has led me so far, and I am excited to see where my final phase takes me.