Cory Neil

EDUC 450
Data Analysis
November 16, 2014
In my time spent with the 4th period English 11 integrated class at Thompson Valley, I have come
to notice a severe discrepancy between the ability levels I have been able to observe through my
interaction with the students and the standing grades they have for the course. Based on observations and
interactions with the class, the students all come across as capable of better than average performance and
although some clearly find some of the material more difficult than others, in general they seem to have a
grasp of it and are able to demonstrate understanding. However, this is not the situation I see when I
review their current over-all grades. As the grades currently stand, there are the following statistics:
A4
B8
C9
D4
F2
Of the students who currently hold Cs, 3 are in the lower half of the grade range, and of those there are 2
who are dangerously close to slipping down to Ds. In order to get a better understanding of the situation
I conducted an in-depth examination of the grades for the entire class looking for trends in performance
on assignments of certain types. I then carefully reviewed the students individual files to look for any
justifications for the grade ranges. Specifically, I was looking for availability of parental support and
home structure do the students have one or two parents at home or do they have some other living
situation, and do they have a single stable address or do they divide their time between two or more
homes? I decided to compare the relationship between home life and school performance for two
reasons: first, it is often widely argued that a students home life has a direct and immediate impact on
their performance in school; second, I feel that having a better understanding of this relationship will be
highly beneficial for me as I begin my career as a teacher in considering what types of assignments I give
to students and how much time I should anticipate needing to allot in class to allow students a fair shot a
success when doing work outside of school may be a problem.
Before I began scrutinizing the students individual grades, I took a moment to hypothesize about
what I may find to be the major issues at play here. From discussions with my host teacher and through
my own experience in the class, I know that late or missing work is a constant problem in the class and I
anticipated that this would likely be the main issue for most of the students who currently hold Ds and Fs
in the course as well as those on the low end of the C range. I suspected that there may be a connection
between the availability of support at home and the students ability to get work done outside the
classroom. My expectations were that the students who currently held As and Bs would have a traditional

(2 parent) stable living situation and the students with Ds and Fs would likely have a non-traditional or
non-stable home life. For students who currently have Cs, I anticipated that they would be distributed
relatively equally between traditional and non-traditional households.
To begin my analysis, I first looked at what type of assignments the students had been given over
the course of the semester which were broken down into four main categories: Assessments, Classwork,
Homework, and Quizzes. Out of the four categories, I noted that Assessments and Homework were the
two areas where the students grades displayed the worst performance and were in shocking contrast to
student grades on classwork and quizzes. The statistics are illustrated in the charts below:
14

10

12

10

Assessment
grades

Homework
Grades

6
4

0
As

Bs

Cs

Ds

Fs

As

14

14

12

12

10

10

Classwork
Grades

Cs

Ds

Fs

8
Quiz Grades

Bs

0
As

Bs

Cs

Ds

Fs

As

Bs

Cs

Ds

Fs

It must be noted here that in addition to homework, the four assignments that make up the students
assessment grades were also intended to be completed outside of class. Based on this, it becomes clear
that there is a serious discrepancy between the students performance on work done outside of class and
that completed in class. From these numbers, I believe it is clear that student understanding is not the
issue, rather what I found to be the case is that the poor scores in the Assessment and Homework sections
are largely due to substantial amounts of missing or late work. Missing work goes into the grade book as
a zero, and points are deducted for each day work is late.
As of the time of this analysis, students had been assigned 4 Assessments, and 2 Homework
Packets. It should be noted here that the homework packets which had been used early in the semester
have since been abandoned as format due to the excessive amount of time they consumed in grading. A

closer look at these particular categories revealed significant amounts of missing work in both. Of the 19
students who have a grade of C or lower for their assessments, 10 of them are missing at least one
assignment and 3 are missing two. Similarly, of the 20 students who have a Homework average of C or
lower, 13 have at least one packet missing and 3 are missing both. What became overwhelmingly clear to
me following this analysis is that students are not completing the work they are assigned to do outside of
class and that this is having a direct and dramatic impact on their grades that is in no way indicative of
their actual level of understanding which according to the grades represented for in-class work is
substantially higher for the class as a whole. This lead me to inquire as to what was the cause for the
missing and incomplete work what factors are at play outside of the school that may be hindering
students ability and/or motivation to complete these assignments? While there are students who are
missing classwork assignments as well as quizzes, where this is not due to absences (especially in regards
to classwork), the numbers only indicate that there are a few select students who fail to turn in work of
any type on a fairly regular basis. For my purposes here I have deemed these numbers to be not
immediately relevant to this analysis, but I acknowledge that if taken into account they could shed further
light on the impact a students home environment has on their motivation to succeed in school.
I was suspicious that the students whos grades deviate so drastically between in-class and out-ofclass work may be lacking in the degree of parental support necessary to help them perform on their outof-class assignments as well as they do on their in-class work. I must stress that this is in no way
intended to label or judge any of the students or their parents. By lacking I simply mean to say that for
one reason or another parental support for their school work is limited this may result from any number
of factors and should by no means be interpreted as negative or accusatory in any way. That said, I
decided to look at which students had two parents listed on their personal files and which had only one or
another non-parent relative listed as their guardian. For purely categorical reasons I chose to label the
former as traditional and the latter 2 as non-traditional. I then compared these findings to the students
grades in their out of class assignments. The results are displayed in the graphs below.
7

Traditional

Non-Traditional

Traditional

Non-Traditional

0
As

Bs

Cs

1 - Assessment Grades

Ds

Fs

As

Bs

Cs

Ds

2 - Homework Grades

Fs

As the graphs illustrate, there are an alarmingly large number of students from non-traditional households
with Fs in both their assessments and homework, which takes a step towards confirming my hypothesis
that non-traditional household environments have a noticeable impact on students performance on work
done outside of the school; however, there is also nearly an equal number of students from traditional
households who have Fs for their homework as well. What I believe these numbers indicate is that
although some correlation can be made between a students home environment and their performance on
out-of-class assignments, the simple fact of the matter is that the students are either not applying
themselves or outright not doing work that is assigned outside of class. This is even further reinforced
when compared against the grades they are capable of as demonstrated by their in-class work.
The question now becomes: what can be done about this? The students are clearly capable of
demonstrating their understanding of the material, so it is not an issue of ability. I feel that the real
problem is the type of work the students are assigned all of which, aside from one essay, have been
worksheets of one form or another. It is my opinion that the students simply are not interested, they are
not engaged the work they are assigned is mundane and they do not see the value in it and so have no
motivation to complete it. One option, which has already been put into practice in the class is to do away
with homework as it is having a directly negative impact on the students grades and providing a serious
misrepresentation of their ability level (although it may be an accurate representation of their individual
motivations). Much of what would have previously been assigned for homework in the class is now
being done in-class, and while it may prove to provide a better representation of students learning, it
must be pointed out that it is also taking up a portion of class time that would otherwise have been spent
on active instruction. We already spend a significant portion of class time reading the assigned texts to
the students as it was discovered early on in the semester that they were not doing it on their own outside
of class. All of this results in a generous amount of class time spent doing what should be either prep
work for or practice of the actual lessons. However, considering that such a large portion of the students
simply do not do work out of the class, I feel the options here to be very limited.
The situation for improving their assessment scores is no better. Either they are allowed to
continue on as they have been, or class time is set aside to allow them to work on the assignments. But
once again we run into the issue of time not being available to teach the required curriculum fully and
reach all the standards. Perhaps the best solution here is to break up the assessments into incremental
pieces that build upon one another to ultimately function as a summative assessment for the unit. Instead
of assigning an essay all at once, it could be broken down into individual questions that the students
respond to over the course of a unit and are turned in in stages for review. At the end of the unit they then
can be given a class period to synthesize the pieces into a coherent essay to be turned in at the end of

class. This way they have the teacher available for support throughout the writing process and the teacher
is present to ensure that everyone is actually doing the work. While this might not be ideal, I feel it is a
better solution than letting a significant portion of the class receive grades that are misrepresentative of
their understandings. Another option is to give the students some agency over how they demonstrate their
learning to the teacher. Have the students propose alternative assessments they feel they are more likely
to complete by providing them a check list of sorts outlining what understandings they must be able to
demonstrate and allowing them to come up with the means to do so. It has been my experience with this
particular set of students that they are far more willing to apply themselves to their work when they are
given a degree of freedom as to how they will complete it.
Ultimately, I do not feel that instruction is the issue with this class of students. Rather, I believe
what is missing is the emphasis on the value of the work they are assigned and the implications and
consequences of not completing it. I feel that there is sufficient data to warrant the idea that many of the
students who are doing poorly in the course due to not completing the work they are assigned outside of
class are doing so in part due to some issue or other at home be it a lack of parental support, more
pressing demands of their time, or some other factor that detracts from their ability to do that work
successfully and in a timely manner. However, the data is not sufficient to proclaim this to be the
situation affecting the grades of all the students who are doing poorly due to missed assignments. While
it will most certainly require more work on the part of the teacher, I believe what is called for in this
situation is the implementation of some highly individualized assignments assignments that will spark
the students interest, get them excited about the opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned, and
show to them that their individual success truly matters to someone. One thing that is abundantly clear is
that the way things have been going up till now is not working and is not providing the entire class the
opportunities they need to be and feel successful. Without question, it is imperative that they are allotted
time in class to work on their more significant assignments such as those used for assessments, but I
worry that without augmenting this with additional motivation and clear relevance, little will change for
the better and the extra expenditure of time may actually result in further decline in student performance
and work habits.