Analyzing What African American Students Articulate as Lesson Goals: Assessing Their Interpretations of Lesson Objectives with respect to Instructional Representations used in the Science Classroom

Abstract

The focus of this research was to identify the information African American students articulated from science lessons. This knowledge was obtained from the students' interpretations of objectives in regards to instructional representations implemented to teach science concepts. Because of the benefits available to educators, this study utilized action research as a methodology for data collection.

My involvement as both the classroom science teacher and researcher allowed me to use the sixth grade students I taught as participants in this work. Though all of the students who attended my science class were exposed to the same teaching and use of instructional representations, only information from the thirty-eight African American students was analyzed for this research.

Data was collected after classroom instruction and exposure to different instructional representations. Information was gathered through students' responses on feedback sheets. This information allowed me to observe the extent to which students' articulations of lesson goals aligned with the objectives for the lessons. It also allowed me to determine if this alignment varied with the instructional representations used to teach the objectives.

The results showed that differences existed between the educator's objectives for the lesson and students' interpretations of the content. Additionally, data revealed variations in alignment with respect to the instructional representations employed.