Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Availability

Open Access Dissertation

Abstract

Administrators and teachers are overwhelmed with initiatives and expectations that they are supposed to juggle on a daily basis. When a problem of practice is identified, how do they know what to do about it? In this study, an administrator and leadership team members of a small, rural elementary school use Improvement Science as a framework to tackle their problem of practice.

Fluency reading proficiency scores have been on a slow decline at South Falls CSD over the past five to six years. Educators have been attempting to identify the holes in the curriculum and “filling the gaps” with various programs throughout the years, to no avail. Once so many programs were implemented, the leaders in the school were not sure how to figure out what was working and what was not. The leadership team and administrator of the building recognized that, historically, they had been answering the first two questions of Improvement Science: “What specifically are we trying to accomplish?” and “What change might we introduce and why?” The third question is what we had failed to answer in the past, which is arguably the most important: “How will we know that a change is actually an improvement?”

The leadership team and administrator at South Falls CSD developed a series of activities to lead the rest of the teachers through the process of identifying the current reality of reading instruction, researching best practices in reading, and identifying the areas of need in a curriculum resource moving forward. Ultimately, the team was able to use the Improvement Science framework to choose a new literacy resource, implement the resource and begin to better monitor improvements in their reading fluency scores.

Year of Submission

2024

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Department

Department of Educational Psychology, Foundations, and Leadership Studies

First Advisor

Robert Boody

Date Original

2024

Object Description

1 PDF file (100 pages)

Language

en

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