Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dain A. Shimabuku
September 24, 2010
ETEC 687
Evaluate the effectiveness of using blogs to support the tutorial process among high
school AVID students 2
The purpose of this action research project is to evaluate the effectiveness of
using blogs to support the tutorial process among high school AVID students at King
Kekaulike High School on the island of Maui. AVID is a college preparatory program to
assist those who are in the middle level and want the extra support to perform well in
school and attend a four year college. Many education programs are created for the gifted
and the disabled and not the students in the middle. One of the pillars of AVID is weekly
tutorial sessions. In these sessions students create higher level questions and to discover
the process of finding the answer. The sessions are run by AVID tutors who are trained in
the tutorial process. Creating a blog to facilitate the tutorial session may be more
“Being situated within the internet allows bloggers to access their blogs anywhere
outside the classroom” (Huffaker, 2005). Blogs allow students to receive assistance from
each other after school hours, where daily assessment takes place. “Collaborative
activities might improve some distance learners’ social integration process and possibly
sustain their motivation, which would lead to higher involvement in coursework, and,
in this study lack motivation, this online tutorial process could lead them to be motivated
in their courses.
King Kekaulike high school is in its third year of implementing the AVID elective
class. The AVID elective class is mostly made up of 18 students who have the
I intend to create a blog using Ning where students will be able to post questions
and receive feedback from their classmates. Their participation in the blog will be apart
Evaluate the effectiveness of using blogs to support the tutorial process among high
school AVID students 3
of their grade and students will be instructed not to share answers but post questions to
understand how students feel about the face-to-face tutorial session done in class. During
interview the participants to determine is the online tutorial session was better then the
face-to-face session. All surveys will use the Likert Scale format.
During the first two weeks of implementation students will create a Ning account
and practice posting and responding to a question. During the next four weeks students
will be required to post a question once a week and give feedback to two of their
At the end of the implementation period I will gather and review the data from the
surveys that are given to the participants. I will create graphs that compare the pre and
post survey answers. I will develop a summary of the comments and observations
Besides developing the blog to assist with tutorial sessions many students come
across problems when completing homework after school hours. Having a blog where
questions can be posted may allow students to receive the peer help that may be
necessary to complete assignments or study for tests. Students build an online resource as
well as develop an online asynchronous learning environment. The results of this study
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