Conducted Action research to find out if break out rooms in an online school showed the same positive benefit as collaborative learning.

1. Running head: APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 1
Module 4: Application: Action Research
Laura Smith
American College of Education

2. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 2
Introduction
“More than ever, educators across the United States are held accountable for their
student’s learning... Teachers and administrators must be able to identify clearly what techniques
are effective at improving student learning, which ones are not…” (Ross-Fisher. R, 2008, p.
160). Action research is a way for teachers to gather data and see if an instructional strategy
helps improve the learning of the students in their classroom. As a teacher teaching Algebra to
high school student at an online school in Arizona there are strategies that research says are
effective at improving student learning but I wonder how they can transfer to an online
environment and will they still be effective in this environment. One of the issues in an online
environment is I do not see my students face to face and I do not teach them every day. I do
have two live lessons a week that I can teach them and office hours three times a week where
they can come and get one-on-one help in my live lesson room. Another issue is that students
are not required to attend live lessons or office hours so they can get all their instructions from
our program and never have contact with me as a teacher. My research will be in a high school
Algebra 1 class so mostly with ninth graders. My research will look at implementing
cooperative learning in an online environment.
Problem statement and Research Questions
According to Fareed Ahmad (2010) “Student working cooperatively believe that their
classmates like them. This belief that they are accepted by others allows the students to believe
that they are more successful academically. This perception of success increases students’ self-
esteem” (P. 129). My students struggle with the belief that students are successful. By going to
school online my students do not get the social interaction as much as if they went to a traditional

3. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 3
school. In my classroom, my live lesson attendance is high at the beginning of semester but as
the semester goes along attendance decreases. Michael Dyson and Margaret Plunkett (2012)
quote Tsay and Brady (2010) “cooperative learning is one of the most commonly used forms of
active learning.” With the problem of students attending and with the difficult of Algebra I see a
need to explore ways to engage my students more and find strategies that will work in an online
environment. In my live lesson room there is a feature called breakout rooms. It is where I can
sort the students randomly or I can put them in groups manually. I can set up as many rooms as
needed. Students can work on same content or I can set up different content for different groups.
Talking with other teachers at my school breakout rooms are not used much if at all by the high
school math teachers but are used more with Social Studies and English teachers. Since I have
not had opportunity to see breakout rooms being used successfully in math I have not
implemented in my classroom but I see the active participation decrease as the semester goes
along. Algebra has a high failure rate. I want to improve performance on unit test and increase
active participation in live lessons. I want to look at data and see if implementing breakout
rooms in my live lesson have similar benefits in a virtual setting as face to face in a traditional
classroom. In breakout rooms students will work together to solve world problems and higher
order thinking questions. I will be going from room to room and making observations and
helping as needed just as in a traditional classroom the teacher moves around the room and from
group-to-group. My questions are will implementing breakout rooms improve my algebra
students’ performance on unit test? Another question is will using breakout rooms increase
active participation in live lessons?
Literature Review

4. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 4
Cooperative learning in the classroom has students working together in groups to
complete tasks and master learning objectives. It is a very common instructional practice.
Interest and research in cooperative learning stated in 1970. These studies found that students
through working together can help each other learn, help motivate each other, improve their
social skills and communication skills. These studies and finding helped other extend the
research into cooperative learning. These new studies found that cooperative learning resulted in
higher academic success and higher productivity. A study by Slavin (1996) found that students
had higher achievement when they worked together but that when working cooperatively
learning was best when there was group goals and individual accountability were a part of the
structure of the groups (Gillies, R, 2014).
A report by Davidson and Knoll (1991) found that less than half of the studies they
looked at showed huge achievement differences between cooperative learning and traditional
teaching methods. However, when there was a significant difference cooperative learning was
the method that came out ahead. Webb (1991) in a report after looking at different research
found that there were benefits to cooperative learning depending on the structure of the group
and the help provided. Smith, Mckenna and Hines study the effects of cooperative learning in
math on a longer population. The study was conducted of eighth graders in the US. To found out
how the amount of group work impacted student achievement and how it affected students
attitudes toward math and their self confidence in being successful in math. The study found that
those that work in groups at least half the lessons did have increased academic achievement and
held more growth mind set toward math than those that did not work cooperatively they did find
the effects small. The benefits were better when group work at moderate frequency. They found
this to be consistent with what the national council of teachers of mathematics that classroom

5. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 5
instruction needs to be balanced to have individual learning, small group learning and direct
instruction. The study also found that students attitudes towards math significantly increase for
any amount of group work compared to students who did not cooperative learning activities.
This suggests that cooperative learning could be a strategy to help students have a higher and
more positive attitude towards mathematics (Smith, T, Mckenna, C & Hines, E. 2013).
In today’s society, people have to be able to work together and collaborate with other
people and other countries. In classrooms that use collaborative learning students have
discussions on topics and they help evaluate other student’s knowledge and reasoning and they
help each work together with all their strength and weaknesses. Scientific studies in cooperative
learning. Tarim ( 2015) did a meta-analysis of the research on cooperative learning. He included
experimental studies from 1988 to 2010 that looked at cooperative learning on mathematics
achievement and attitudes towards math. The findings were that cooperative learning was more
successful at increasing student achievement than traditional methods. They also found that
cooperative learning was most effective at the university and preschool level. Looking at it by
math topic cooperative learning was most effective for Geometry and Algebra. The meta-
analysis found that cooperative learning was affective in students’ attitudes towards math (Capar,
G & Tarim K 2015).
Methodology
When conducting research the study needs to have validity and reliability. A way to
increase the validity and reliability of our research is by using triangulation. “We can accomplish
triangulation with data collection tools by using multiple tools that provide different kinds of
measurement but of the same variable” (Metcalf, K. 2016, slide 7). My different tools I will be

6. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 6
using to answer my research questions are pre-assessment, Formative assessments that will be in
the form of exit tickets and self-reflections and a post assessment.
First set of data I gathered was a pre-assessment so I can get a baseline of what my
students already know. Being in an online environment this was administered at the beginning
of the live lesson before any teaching or breakout rooms has happened. I had the questions in a
PowerPoints. There was eight questions, seven were short response with two being word
problems and one was matching. The seven short response questions covered simplifying
radicals and operations with radicals and the multiple choice questions was about graphs of
square root functions and understanding translation from the parent function of square root of x.
The students will type in their answers if they know it or respond with I do not know if they do
not. If I was in a traditional classroom, they could just leave questions blank and then hand the
pre-assessment in. In a virtual environment where I do not see the students face to face I need to
know that they are participating and have them give me a response. A feature of poll pods is that
students do not see the answer of other students unless I decide to broadcast the result, which in
this case I will not. This data will be quantitative as it can be measured how many students
could answer different standard based questions. By knowing where my students’ knowledge is
at the beginning of the research, I can then see if there is any growth by using breakout rooms
when I give an assessment at the end. This will help me answer if breakout rooms improve
student performance on assessments.
The second set of data I collected was formative assessment. I gather during live lessons
and the use of breakout rooms. These will be in the form of exit tickets at the end after they had
time in breakout rooms where they worked in groups of four or with partners on math concept
for the day. These exit questions were given in poll pods so students do not see other student

7. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 7
responses and I can measure their growth having worked in small groups. There are two types of
questions in the exit ticket. This first was concept questions so I can gather data on the learning
that took place in the breakout rooms and see how the breakout rooms are influencing student
performance. The other is self-reflection they will reflect on their participation and the
participation of their teammates or partners. I also observed the level of participation as I went
from room to room. This self-reflection and my observations will help me answer if breakout
rooms are influencing student active participation. These are both quantitative and qualitative as
the concept questions can be measured and the reflection are qualitative as they are more on what
the students felt their participation was and that can be subjective and harder to measure.
The last set of data I collected was the post assessment. This was administered similar to
the pre-assessment. Where they answered in poll pods and it will be given at the beginning of the
live lesson. They answered seven questions on simplifying radicals, Operations with radicals and
graphing radical functions. This is quantitative as I will be able to measure how the students
performed on the content. This will help me answer if breakout rooms increased student
performance on assessments, as I will have several different data points to see if students showed
any growth.
Data Analysis
I gathered self-reflections from students after breakout rooms and my own observations
to see how active students were. Normally I have only a few students answering questions when
we are all together. The first day in breakout rooms they were in groups of four and one group
was very active and helping each other work out the problems. The other group struggled. I had
to help them get started. They were not communicating much with each other. One of the

8. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 8
students afterward in her reflection mentioned that she felt like her group wanted her to do all the
work. I also had a range of response in the self-reflection where students in the group that
worked well saying they were helping each other out and asking for help when they did not
understand. In the group that did not work as well I got more responses of I was not active I just
listened and I was somewhat active I tried to help and give input when I could. The next two
breakout rooms sessions I modified and had them work as partners. My observation showed all
students actively participating and students self-reflection show they felt they were more
involved and so where their partners and communicated and worked together more. There were
no responses of I did all the work.
For information on whether breakout rooms improved student performance on tests. I used Pre-
assessment, exit tickets and post- assessment as data to answer this question. .
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
Question 1
simplifying
radicals
Questions 2
simplifying
radicals
Questions 3
simplifying
radicals
Questions 4
operations
with
radicals
Question 5
operations
with
radicals
Question 6
graphing
square
roots
Question 7
graphing
square
roots.
Pre-test
Exit tickets
Post-test

9. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 9
I made a graph showing each questions with the concepts it covered and the percentage of
students that got the question correct. The students at the beginning showed that they had no
previous knowledge of the concept. Question seven was multiple choice and the one student that
got it correct was able to guess correctly as she was not sure as she put a question mark after.
Students mostly did better on the exit tickets when the concepts were fresh in their minds than on
the post-test after a few days had passed.
Conclusions
I found that breakout rooms when they were working with partners did increase their
participation where they were all working on solving all the problems and talking with each
other. However, when they were working in groups of four that participation was mixed.
Participation might increase if they had more training of using breakout rooms and working
together with math concepts in a virtual setting.
On the findings of whether breakout rooms increased student performance on
assessments there was an improvement as the students started out not knowing anything for the
most part. The percentage of students showing mastery was very low. Only one question on
post-test showed that most students understood and mastered that concept. Even with the exit
tickets only two questions and concepts showed that the majority of the students mastered the
concept. Based on this analysis breakout rooms did not improve student performance on
assessments.
Communication of Findings

10. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 10
I emailed the draft of my research to a couple teachers at my school. We then meet in my
live lesson room so that I could answer questions and further explain what I did during my
breakout sessions. They then gave me feedback and suggestions. According to L. Raderstorf
(personal communication, May 6, 2016) “if you start early in the semester with breakouts, say
this fall, I think you will have more success with their comfort and participation in the small
groups. I think they will then feel successful as well.” A. Houseman suggested (personal
communication May 6, 2016) “to start early like Raderstorf said and gather different feedback
from students like did the breakout groups help get questions answered? Do they feel they were
able to help other? Do they feel more successful after the session?”
Future Actions
There are a few things I would do differently if I could. The first have the research go
longer. Being in a virtual environment I do not see the students everyday so there where only a
pre-test, three live lessons using breakout rooms and a post-test. There needs to be a longer time
so there could be more time to get students used to using breakout rooms and working together.
Another benefit of going longer is the post-test could be the one that assigned for the unit and
affects their grade more. Because live lessons are not mandatory and I do not write the
curriculum or test they take I could not make the post-test more than participation grade and
therefore not sure how seriously they tried on the post- assessment. Another thing I would like
to do is do this research more at the beginning of the year when there are more students attending
and can work on training them how to use breakout rooms and work together as they are getting
used to the class and how things are ran. Since partners seemed to work well for active
participation I think it would be very beneficial for our intervention sessions. Those are
mandatory and meet more often during the week. It is also a small group for the whole year so

11. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 11
partners would work really well. I could also more easily differentiate the level of difficulty of
the problems for the students. So students struggling with solving two step equations can work
on those while those that struggling with multi-step can work on those. I am going to continue
researching this idea of using breakout rooms. I am also going to implement and use as
appropriate in my intervention live lessons.
References
Ahmad, F. (2010). Effect of Cooperative Learning on Students' Achievement at Elementary
Level. International Journal of Learning, 17(3).
Capar, G., & Tarim, K. (2015). Efficacy of the cooperative learning method on mathematics
achievement and attitude: A meta-analysis research.Educational Sciences: Theory &
Practice, 2, 553-559.
Dyson, M., & Plunkett, M. (2012). Making a difference by embracing cooperative learning
practices in an alternate setting: An exciting combination to incite the educational
imagination. Journal of Classroom Interaction, 47(2), 13-24.

12. APPLICATION: ACTION RESEARCH 12
Gillies, R. M. (2014). Cooperative learning: Developments in research.International Journal of
Educational Psychology, 3(2), 125-140.
Ross-Fisher, R. (2008). Action research to improve teaching and learning. Kappan Delta Pi
Record, 44(4), 160-164.
Smith, T. J., McKenna, C. M., & Hines, E. (2014). Association of group learning with
mathematics achievement and mathematics attitude among eighth-grade students in the
US. Learning Environments Research, 17(2), 229-241.