Action Research

1. What is the title of the project?
-What happens to third graders' writing when they participate in a reading and letter writing program?

2. What is the problem?
-The problem is third grade writers struggle with language development and all components of letter writing; dialogue, organization, sentence structure, flow, text-connections, vocabulary, mechanics, support from the reading, and making references about themselves.

3. Describe the instructional intervention.
-The instructional intervention is the implemention of the penpal letter writting program.

4. What kind of strategy is the instructional intervention?
- Simulation and games is the instructional intervention used for this. The students simulated writing letters to their penpal to learn how to write a professional letter.

5. What evidence is presented that the strategy will work?
-Providing students the opportunity to visualize and model improves their chances for understanding. Simulations enhance this potential by making modeling dynamic. Simulations and games provide powerful new opportunities for learning.
Simulations allow learners the opportunity to model, explore, and try out a variety of strategies.

6. How will data be collected to determine if the strategy will work?
- Collecting letters at random across the implemention of the penpal letter writting program. More than one letter was collected per student and it was graded with a rubric.

7. How was the data analyzed?
- Comments from book discussions and a scoring rubric were used to analyze data. The rubric was designed specifically for this pen pal letter writing research, and a rubric guide. The data was collected over a period of four months and was measured against the tool--letter-writing rubric.

8. What were the results?
- The students letters and their written improved with each letter written to their penpal. The occurence of errors decreased. However many of them still struggled with vocabulary and mechanics.