Determine What effect, if any, does the use of Twitter have on student understanding through use of real-world, real-time application of content-area concepts?
In AP Government and Politics at Bellaire High School,
we implemented the use of individual Twitter accounts to better monitor and
assess student understanding in real-time. The first step was to introduce the
students to Twitter. As ubiquitous as it seemed to us, the students were
unfamiliar and somewhat resistant. After telling them to look for hashtags,
they discovered they had just not noticed it, yet. The students were to watch
the party nomination acceptance speeches of both presidential candidates, as
well as the inauguration of the President and the State of the Union address.
During these events, they were to tweet a minimum of three times during the
speeches. They were also to monitor the tweets of prominent members of both
parties. We were able to monitor the students at home on a Tweet Deck and
verify participation.
The results were profound. Students who participated
displayed higher level thinking skills, great engagement in the process, and
greater development of discussion skills among peers.
The final steps will be to review the data,
specifically, the effect of discussion in real-time. The students will fill out
a survey measuring how they perceive the results of using Twitter. I am still
considering measuring the correlation between test scores and participation.
The issue here is the basic consideration of the more talkative student. I may
interview the classroom teacher to see how she believes the students level of
participation online compares to their participation in the classroom. The next
step is to develop a tool to measure this comparison.
As a result of this action research project, I
anticipate a strong correlation between participation in real-time discussions
of political events to increase understanding of content-area concepts.
