Sheffield 1

Sarah Sheffield
EDIS 5877
Michael Kennedy
25 April 2018
Case Study: Encouraging Student Participation in order to Increase Time On-Task
Context:
I chose to spend time working with a special education student who will be known as
Tamara. Tamara is a sixth grade African American girl. She is a sweet girl who has many friends,
and she is often involved in friend drama with her group. She is identified as having a specific
learning disability and ADHD. Her teachers from elementary school report that she has difficulty
attending to tasks and benefits from having instructions repeated to her and working in small
groups. I worked with Tamara when she was in my English Language Arts placement, and I have
her in my math collaborative class. While we have a strong relationship, I often struggle to get
her to start or complete work.
Observed Problem and Data:
Over the course of the school year, I have noticed that Tamara struggles with self-
confidence when it comes to work. She often insists that she is incapable of completing a
problem or is not smart. Further, when I work with her, she often is unable to tell me what we
are doing or how to do it even if it was recently explained by a teacher. While there are more
steps a teacher can take to support her understanding, I also noticed that she was rarely where
she needed to be nor paying attention to the board. While this lack of attention is part of her
disability, I felt that she could work to improve her attention and then the teachers could
provide supports to help her. As I began to observe her more closely, I noticed that she often
took a very long time to get her materials together when given a task. If she needed a pencil,
for example, she would take a very long time to get the pencil out, then arrange her binder, and
then put her binder away. Because of this delay when getting materials, I decided to take
latency data to see how much time Tamara was losing between a teacher giving instruction and
Tamara beginning the task.
I took data for five class periods for the first twenty minutes of each class. I chose this
time because it is when she needs to first get her materials prepared and where I expected she
would lose a great deal of time during the class period. While I was focusing on latency data, I
also took notes on what I observed Tamara doing between being given a direction and
following through with that direction. I also found trends of her disengaging from class. What I
learned through this data is that Tamara has days where she is quickly able to get ready to go,
and she has days where she loses a great deal of time getting her materials together. I also
realized that once she has her materials together, she often is on-task and listening to the
teacher. At first, I felt like I might have picked the wrong behaviors to observe since she was on-
task more than I expected. However, when looking through my observation data, I noticed that
Tamara rarely engaged when the teacher gave the students opportunities to respond. When
called on directly, Tamara said, “Huh?” each time before responding. When the class was asked
to offer answers, she would sit quietly and wait even if she knew the answer. When given the
direction to talk with a partner, Tamara only engaged briefly during one class period. When
given choral reading tasks, Tamara was never looking at the board. I began to realize that when
she would purposefully not participate in those activities, she would then lose focus and begin
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doing something else, causing her to miss the next direction or instruction from the teacher.
Over the course of the week, Tamara only engaged in 1 out of the 17 observed opportunities to
respond.
While the data I collected was able to help me address some misconceptions, I also
learned that Tamara does lose a great deal of time when she delays getting her materials
together. That ends up snowballing to cause her to take more time to follow the next directions
as well. Some days Tamara was able to be prepared immediately and only lose about 40
seconds worth of time over an entire 20 minute period, but other days, Tamara lost up to 7
minutes during a 20 minute period. Overall, Tamara was losing 7.5 minutes per hour on
average. She would often take an average of 42 seconds to respond to stimuli such as the bell
ringing, teacher redirection, and teacher instructions to move to a new task. Distracting
behaviors that repeated themselves were getting out of her seat and talking to peers, going to
the trashcan, and looking for a pencil in her binder.
Intervention:
The plan that I developed focused a bit on the strategies that the teachers at my school
were encouraged to try in order to practice culturally responsive teaching. This strategy is using
academic conversations to help students identify where they can improve and how. I pulled
Tamara during the twenty minute end of day organizational time period. We sat together and
talked about what she likes to do in school and out of school, we discussed her opinion about
school, and I approached the question of what would be a good reward for her. Then, I told her
a little about what I saw in class, and I asked if she felt the same way. At the end of the
conversation, I introduced an idea that I had to her and asked what she thought about it. She
said that she would try. After this conversation, I created a chart that she could use to self-
monitor how frequently she participated. In this chart, she would tally the number of times that
she participated and then circle if she completed all of her work. Below is the outline of our
conversation and next steps.
Intervention Plan:
1. Find time to have a conversation with Tamara
a. Open with conversation about what she likes to do in and out of school.
i. Not much… Work out
b. Discuss her thoughts about school
i. Boring
c. What would be a good reward?
i. Free time—sometimes likes being alone
d. Briefly explain what I noticed when I observed: takes a long time to get her stuff
ready to go. Doesn’t participate in class very much.
i. Was surprised
e. Ask her if she feels the same way. Do you think this might affect how well you do
in school?
i. “I guess.”
f. Propose idea: I want you to start participating in class. I want you to be a part of
the community and the leader that I know you can be.
i. Said she would try but doesn’t know how well it would go
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2. Start marking how frequently Tamara engages in opportunities to respond and give
Tamara a sheet to mark how frequently she responds.
3. Follow-up on her chart and my chart during the twenty minutes at the end of the day a
few times a week.
Result of those Interventions:
At first, Tamara was interested in the chart. She questioned when she would be getting it,
and she was good about filling it out. When she noticed I was paying attention during class,
Tamara began to engage and try to respond. She made an effort to be on-task and completing
her work at the beginning of the class. When she first met her goal of participating three times,
Tamara was very excited. She was proud of herself and wanted to tell me about it. I encouraged
her to continue her progress, but we moved into a unit that was difficult for her and she began
to be quieter. She did stay on task and participate in the objectives and partner talks more.
However, she wouldn’t risk answers and she tried not to be noticed by the teacher. This led to a
second academic conversation about how to ask for help outside of class and get extra
resources if you feel like you are struggling with a topic. I brought attention to how excited she
was when she was successful to encourage her to find ways to continue feeling that success.
After this conversation, she returned to class and began immediately working on materials that
she had been ignoring. While she continued to fill out the chart, I realized that Tamara was
more worried about circling that she completed her work than she was worried about
participating. She began to not listen to the teachers because she was trying to finish her do-
now. I ended up scratching off the part of her chart that said, “Did you complete all of your
work?” An image of the chart can be found in Appendix A.
The data after the first week of using the chart showed latency data that reflected the
trend from data taken before the conversations and chart were implemented. The frequency of
responses did increase. She participated in opportunities to respond at least once each day. By
the end of the week, she had participated in 12 out of the 57 observed OTRs compared to her 1
out of 17 observed OTRs before.
Despite many academic conversations and follow-ups about the chart, Tamara was too
caught up in drama the second week of the intervention. She put her head down when she
came to class, and she did not want to participate. Also, the math teachers began to move
through content at a much quicker rate, so Tamara often felt behind and out of place. She still
participated more than before, but her overall attitude and her performance on quizzes did not
improve.
In the second week of observations, the latency data once again reflected the baseline data.
I was not able to increase her time on-task with this intervention. However, her responses were
still more frequent. She responded 7 out of 52 observed opportunities to respond, which was
lower than the first week of the intervention and higher than the baseline. See Appendix B to
see the graph of her participation rate. Appendix C demonstrates the latency data remaining
about the same and demonstrating between about 5 and 10 minutes lost per hour of class.
Reflection:
Overall, Tamara and my relationship grew based on this intervention and her willingness to
participate in class increased. However, Tamara still loses a great deal of class time by taking
too long to gather materials and get on-task. With continued efforts and a greater focus on
strategies she could use to be prepared, I think that more progress could have been made;
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however, in the two weeks, the chart was not used frequently, and she was not able to
significantly decrease her preparation time.

Appendix A
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Appendix B

Appendix C