Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Educational Studies

Sub-Department

College of Education

First Advisor

Toby Jenkins-Henry

Abstract

As a scholar practitioner, the goal is to use the most effective teaching strategies available to help eighth-grade social studies students retain the vocabulary from each unit of study and increase both their short- and long-term memories. The problem identified for this action research was that the current use of the word wall (WW) vocabulary retention tool was not successful in accomplishing this goal. Further, I observed that students were not performing at grade level on the district mandated benchmarks at the end of each quarter. Using four phases of conducting a study, I reviewed literature to discover what was known about teaching strategies to enhance content area vocabulary retention. The present study involved the implementation of an interactive version of the word wall (IWW). The six-week intervention included four weeks of interactive activities that used a multimodal approach to learning with the goal of enhancing learning through active participation. Qualitative and quantitative data was collected to measure the effectiveness of the intervention. The research question was aligned with the identified problem of practice (PoP) and states: What are the effects of an IWW enhancement strategy on the retention of social studies vocabulary when implemented in an eighth-grade social studies class?

Rights

© 2018, Paketrice Jones

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