ONE TIP Finding

When I began planning this TIP, I believed that the most telling piece of data that would answer the question of whether podcasting actually improved students oral reading ability was the one minute oral reading assessments administered at the beginning of the TIP and at the end. The one minute tests assessed students in the following ways;

• Fluency-Automaticity (words correct per minute)
• and a Multidimensional Fluency Scale that gave a grade based on a rubric that combined the following Expression/volume, Phrasing and intonation, Smoothness, and pace.

I believed that what I should see is that students would read more words per minute at the end of the TIP because they created 4 podcasts that they had created should have provided them with oral reading practice that should've boosted their scores on the second test. The results were not what I anticipated. WCPM on their first test was 160 on average. That average went DOWN on the second test, to 153. The obvious conclusion is that podcasting actually makes kids dumber, as evidenced by the decline in the wpm scores ;-). However, that doesn't tell the whole story. The scores on the multidimensional fluency scale went up from an average of 10.1 out of 16 to 11.1. That represents almost a 10% increase, versus a 4 % decline on the wpm scores. What do I conclude? I think that the students raced through the first test at the expense of using proper expression, phrasing etc..., and that after making podcasts they realized that there's more to reading fluency than reading quickly and as a result they read slower, but with more emphasis on the other aspects of reading fluency.

I do have some other conclusions based on student surveys and my own evaluation of the podcasts themselves. Perhaps tomorrow I'll post those. But right now, my brain is tired after a long week of work. (it's Wed. the start of my weekend...)