How do students learn best?: Action Research

To be quite honest, when I heard we had to do research while student teaching, I was anything but excited. I have never done research, and I was stumped as to what direction to go in. After thinking for awhile, I saw a good opportunity to conduct research during my Introduction to Agriculture classes. This class is back-to-back 5th and 6th period, and both are taught identical content. I decided that I would like to explore how students learn best, by using teacher-centered and student- centered instruction. I settled on my Plant and Soil Science Unit, since it provided lots of opportunities for a variety of teaching techniques.

To begin the unit, I gave students a pre-test, with 10 questions focusing on soil science topics that would be covered in the unit. Throughout the week of the plant science portion, I taught 5th period using a student-centered approach. This approach included a lot of inquiry, hands-on activities and group work. During 6th period, I took a more teacher-centered approach. I gave lots of lectures, had students complete a lot of notes and overall provided more structure.

Some lessons that I taught throughout this portion of the unit included soil horizons, soil texture, soil "ingredients", soil formation and soil pH. For example, when teaching soil horizons, I had an edible soil horizon activity for the students. During 5th period, I taught a short lesson about each of the soil horizons, then provided students with ingredients and asked them to create a soil profile, using what they learned. During 6th period, I provided students with individual brown bags of ingredients and a structured note sheet. I presented a PowerPoint and had students take notes and then add ingredients as I told them to, to create their soil profiles. Generally speaking, 5th periods lessons were typically a lot less structured and left up to student interpretation, while 6th period's were often structured and straight-forward.

At the end of the unit, I had students take a post-test, where they were given identical soil science questions as they had before. I then collected and analyzed the number of correct and incorrect answers for each student, from the pre and post-tests, and tabulated a percentage. I grouped these scores into four categories, as follows:

• Exemplary: 100-90
• Proficient: 89-80
• Intermediate: 79-70
• Poor: 69 and under

I created bar graphs to compare pre and post-test scores for each class, and used this information to analyze my data (below). While students scores in both classes exponentially increased from the pre to the post-test, the research was relatively inconclusive as to whether or not student centered or teacher centered instruction was more effective.

One interesting thing that I chose not to include in my "official" research, was that students seemed to enjoy the student-centered class more. I included a short portion of extra credit opinion questions at the end of the post-test for each class. When looking at and comparing the results of these questions, I found that students in the student-centered class, in general, indicated that they enjoyed the activities and class more than students in the teacher-centered class did. When asked what their favorite activities were, they seemed to indicate that the more hands-on activities (or the ones with food!) were their favorites, which came as no surprise to me.


Overall, I think that my research was interesting, and helped get my feet wet in scholarly research. I was a bit disappointed that my research was relatively inconclusive, but I think if I was able to research for a longer period of time (perhaps even an entire school year) as well as practice more inquiry and create more lessons which are distinctly either teacher or student-centered, my research might have turned out differently.