Success of the Project

Overall, it was evident that Insipration supported the recommendations given to the teachers at the beginning of this project:
-Students acquired a new tool to help organize and collect their ideas prior to writing a paper or essay question
-They were motivated to use graphic organizers in the future
-They felt that they benefitted from using Inspiration
-They were confident in themselves to be able to use Inspiration again in the future

Post-Survey

Once the students had completed their writing assignments, they were given a post-survey to assess their new outlook on Inspiration and graphic organizers as pre-writing activities.

The following summary describes how effective the 7th grade students thought Insipiration and graphic organizers were as a pre-writing activity:
-The rating of how helpful they felt graphic organizers were increased from 5.7 to 7.2
-60% of the students enjoyed creating graphic organizers with Inspiration
-The students’ rating of how helpful Inspiration was as a pre-writing tool was 8.4
-86% of the students felt that the video tutorial was helpful

The following data summarizes the results of the survey:

Assessing the Students

After the students receieved training on Inspiration, they were ready to use the program.  On two seperate days, they were asked to complete an ECR question.  Each day, they were presented with an ECR question from a section out of their World History textbooks.  Students had 20 minutes to read the section, 20 minutes to create a graphic organizer using Inspiration, and 20 minutes to write their essay answer.

Since the surveyor was not the students teacher, there were incentives involved to motivate the students.  First, they were instructed that this project would provide them with knowledge and practice to help them become better writers.  In addition, they were rewarded with 15 extra credit points by their social studies teacher.

Training Students to Use Inspiration

Following the pre-survey, 15 students were selected for the next step of the project.  These students were labeled by their teacher as low level-writers but had a decent ability to use technology.  The next step of the project was to train the students on how to use Inspiration.  The surveyor used this video tutorial as a training tool.

Pre-Survey

A survey was given to the students to assess how much they prefer and use graphic organizers as a pre-writing tool.  Here is a link to the survey

Here is a summary of the findings:
-When asked to rate how helpful they felt graphic organizers were as a pre-writing activity (scale of 1-10, 10 being highest), the average student rating was 5.7
-Almost half of the students “Somewhat” enjoy using graphic organizers
-Six students had used Inspiration before. When asked to use the previous rating to score its helpfulness, the average student rating was 6.5

In addition, here are some graphs that display the data found from the survey

 

Why Graphic Organizers?

Graphic organizers a great pre-writing tool.  They allow students to collect and organize their ideas before jumping into a paper or essay answer.  A great amount of research has taken place to study the effectiveness of the urse of graphic organizers and student performance.  A majority of these studies showed a positive effect of the use of graphic organizers and student comprehension.  The term “comprehension” includes: Reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge and student learning.  The Center for Applied Special Technology collected data from 15 studies to test the effectiveness of graphic organizers and student comprehension.  Of those 15 studies, 58.3% reported positive effects, 20% reported no effect, and 33% reported negative effects (http://www.cast.org/publications/ncac/ncac_go.html).

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