How will incorporating goal setting impact my first grade students’ academic growth?

Seminar Title

How will incorporating goal setting impact my first grade students’ academic growth?

Goal setting and students tracking their own progress is the focus of this research.

1st Grade

1st Grade

Reading

All Disciplines

What is the ONE thing first graders can’t WAIT to do in first grade?? If you said “READ” you are absolutely correct! Everything these little ones do, they want results RIGHT NOW! They come to my classroom and say, “when are we going to learn to read?” My response is “WOW! I love that you are so motivated to learn!” My job from there on out is to keep their motivation levels high and to start our year with having them write about their “Hopes and Dreams for First Grade”. This is a great way to introduce how to set goals at their level of understanding. At my seminar I will discuss how goal setting and students tracking their own progress impacted their learning. I will have materials I included during their progress monitoring and the goal setting sheets we used. My action research can also relate to any other discipline at all grade levels. So if you are interested in how goal setting worked (or didn’t work) with first grade, this is the seminar for you!

In today’s data driven classrooms it seems the focus has shifted from engaging and motivating student learning through play, socialization and creativity to motivating and engaging them ONLY to increase test scores. I have yet to find a magic recipe that blends these all together. In the meantime, my plan is to see what kind of impact goal setting and having students track their own progress would have on their academic growth. My hope is that by learning to set goals for themselves, students will stay motivated and engaged enough to increase their desire to continue learning. Through my research I have learned that goal setting and motivation are related and seem to go hand in hand. I learned that by teaching my students how to set goals for themselves, motivates them once they see evidence of those goals being met. The 7 students that I worked with specifically, set weekly goals in reading fluency and sight word recognition. I met with each student once a week to assess and make new learning goals for the next week. As a classroom we also set generic daily goals for academics and behavior. This was a great ways to give them repeated prompts such as “What is our goal today for math?” or “What is our goal today for hallway behavior?” They knew exactly what a goal was and they were very excited when they met that goal and got rewarded as a class. As I was implementing my action research I did a more of a control group and wanted to see results pre implementation and post implementation of goal setting and progress tracking. My results were that I did see an improvement in the areas of words per minute and sight word recognition. One conclusion I came up with is that the improvements came from the repeated reading of a text and also from our weekly practice of our sight words. I do know that my students enjoyed tracking their progress and sharing their results with their parents. I will continue to use repeated reading as an intervention and I will also continue to have my students set goals for themselves. I feel this is a great lifelong skill to teach early that will hopefully stick with them in the future.