I am slowly making my way through a stack of books from the library and I noticed focusing on graphic organizers specifically as a search is limiting what I am getting. Other secondary sources that I will now be looking for are sources pertaining to pre-writing in general.
I have found an article about helping low-achieving students to become better writers using different strategies and I have hopes that this will lead me to more types of pre-writing that I can look into. As I was flipping through the article I was able to see a few different examples of prewriting and writing traits. In the back of this article several resources are also listed and I have pulled out a few I would like to find and have a look at.
As I continue to work on the I-Search research I found it helpful to talk to a teacher I know about what she uses for pre-writing. Fortunately this teacher has several books, which I should be getting today. My hope is that these books will help me to give me alternatives to graphic organizers that are successful in helping students develop their writing.
Overall my hopes are that by using these new sources that I will be able to come up with more ways that successful writing can come from prewriting preparation. Through my research in secondary sources I want to gain an understanding of what specifics parts of a pre-writing are useful to students.
Finding books or secondary sources has been tricky at times for my I-Search Project as well. It sounds like you are on a better track now that you are focusing on more then just graphic organizers though. So that will probably be very helpful. And I'm guessing the teacher that you mention is one of the ones that you will be interviewing, it is really cool that she is being so helpful and offered to give you some books that she has on the topic. Successful writing in schools is very important, and I can't wait to hear how the rest of your project comes together.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that you realized you were limiting yourself by looking for something very specific, such as the graphic organizers. I think this might be a problem for me as well because I have a very particular component that I am looking for among all these sources, which is student interviews and/or responses. Most of what I find is numbers, statistics, and other numerical data. It's hard to find exactly what I want so it helps to be more open minded during this research process for sure. Good luck!
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