I'm getting excited about this Action Research Project; at first the topic that was chosen for me seemed dull and boring:  "How effective is our Algebra I STAAR Remediation Program on campus?"  After reading some of the examples in the Harris text, I can see a lot of potential in this project.  I have known for some time that the skill level of my geometry students is way below what it should be.  Our students come to us with lots of holes in their math background.  This year I learned just how serious the problem is:  our students really do not know how to think, how to study, how to retain information, or how to analyze information.  Copying printed phrases from one document onto another is their way of answering questions.  We are failing them.  One of the causes could be that we have expanded the scope too broadly  to effectively cover the material to mastery level in each grade starting in elementary school.  Another could be that we socially pass students in elementary school when they do well in other core classes but not math or science because we don't want our campus numbers to look bad.  Also we might think that eventually they will just "get it" because they are getting older and maturing. 

I am going to address the effectiveness of our remediation program on campus, exploring if what we do really helps students pass the test the next time it is given, or how many times it takes for them to pass it and what did we do to help them pass. I will follow them as they retest in the fall, the spring and again in the summer.  I will analyze not only the pass rates of the students as a whole, but the specific TEKS that they historically have had difficulty with.

I hope this project leads me to research these students' backgrounds in math and trace their skill development from elementary school through high school, seeing what patterns in learning emerge.  Hopefully we can find a way to intercept these difficulties before they leave elementary school.  This would certainly lead to a higher graduation rate and a higher number of students going on to college.

Having students come to high school level teachers with the correct level of skills would help to make teaching fun again and relieve some of the stress on both teachers and students.