Action Research Project: Determining the Power of Previous Experiences

When brainstorming ideas on what would be beneficial to research, I began to think of my freshman class and the different experiences each of those students have had. Throughout my student teaching experience I have been in charge of grading the freshman SAE books. This has given me a sneak peak into their interest areas and where they spend time outside of school.

I wanted to design a research project that would determine the effect that previous experiences have on new learning. A large portion of my freshman class have livestock entrepreneurship SAE projects, so I saw my livestock judging unit as a good match. On the first day, students were given a survey asking questions on what experiences they have had with pigs, lambs, steers, and dairy cattle. These are the species we discussed in this unit. The numbers worked out perfectly. My section of 12 students were divided equally. Six students had prior experiences with these species and six students had no prior experience with the animals. The groups were arranged as follows: 2 teams with 2 experienced students, 2 teams with 2 inexperienced students, 2 teams with 1 experienced student and 1 inexperienced student.

http://adams.uwex.edu/4-h-youth-development/youth-livestock-sale/

Students were all given the same instruction while I introduced the different species so limit the variables. At the end of the unit, students were evaluated in their groups on their ability to judge classes of the four species. The scores for each team were recorded and graphed to search for any trends.

I found that in this case previous experiences had little effect on the students performance level. This is not what I had expected at all. At the beginning of this study, my hypothesis was that the students who had raised market animals before would preform better that students who haven't had any experiences yet. Although the students did not perform better overall, they were noticeably more familiar with the anatomy of the four different species. I believe this did have a positive influence on the quality of the reasons students gave. You need to know the language in order to talk evaluation.

http://blog.cauvin.org/2013/09/5-ways-companies-make-product-decisions.html

I would like to conduct another study the same way but assess the students before the unit as well. This would give me a baseline starting point as to where all students began knowledge wise. This would allow me to see the growth of all the students and further determine the effects of prior knowledge.