Research

Name: Student from ED 504

Signature Project Stage 1 – Research Proposal Topic

ED 504 – Spring 2025

1. Problem statement: My identified classroom uses primarily independent work or homogeneous small groups for students to complete class assignments. In addition, it does not have a strong classroom culture and students do not engage with each other often. In this classroom, student academic achievement is not as high as student achievement in other classrooms of the same grade level. Past studies have shown that heterogeneous groups have been shown to improve both classroom culture and student academic achievement.

2. Best practice used to address your problem: I plan to integrate heterogeneous grouping into my identified classroom multiple times a week in place of individual work. This will enable different students in my class to work together, regardless of their level of achievement, which will improve the classroom culture and lead to improvements in academic achievement.

3. Hypothesis: Heterogeneous small groups will have a more positive impact on daily student academic achievement than homogeneous groups or independent work.

4. Study Population: The population I will be studying is my identified classroom. This is a seventh-grade general education English classroom with a diverse population of 25 students. These students represent multiple different ethnicities, genders, religions, social classes, and levels of academic achievement.

5a. Independent Variable: The independent variable I will be changing during this study will be the format of grouping students. For three days a week, students will be placed in heterogeneous groups for ten minutes. For one day, students will be placed in homogeneous groups. For one day, students will be given independent work (this can serve as the control variable).

5b. Dependent Variable: The dependent variable I will be measuring in this study is student academic achievement. This will be measured by a pre-test at the beginning of the study, as well as a short “exit ticket” at the end of each day for three weeks. Each exit ticket will have three or four questions about the information learned in class that day. Students will complete the exit ticket individually.

6. Brief plan of action for executing your experimental design: I will begin by giving a pre-test to measure each student’s performance at the beginning of the study. This will enable me to properly assign groups with varying levels of student achievement in each group. Then, students will be placed in heterogeneous groups three times a week for ten minutes at a time. During the other two days, students will complete independent work or be placed in homogeneous groups. At the end of each day, students will complete a short exit ticket. This structure will continue for three weeks. At the end of the study, the exit tickets for each day will be compared to see if students perform better on the days they were placed in heterogeneous groups, homogeneous groups, or working independently.

ED504 Techniques of Educational Research I