Student autonomy is a key part of any instruction. Not only does it build critical thinking skills and other tools that can be used outside of the classroom, but it improves student engagement as well. When students are more engaged, they are more motivated to perform well. While most see student autonomy as giving choice, drowning students with too many choices does not help their learning. Instead, teachers must give students select meaningful choices. Furthermore, autonomy is more than just choice. Allowing students a method to voice their criticism in the instruction allows them an outlet to feel heard and lets them know they are a valued part of the classroom community. Lastly, giving rationale is one of the most important parts of student autonomy. When students understand why they have to learn something or perform a learning task and relate that to their overall goals they have for themselves. With this information in mind, the research project then looked for ways to increase student autonomy in a fourth grade ELA classroom.
To conduct this research, two similar fourth grade students would be studied through the duration of a school year. The control group would be taught using the school’s curriculum, while the experimental group would be used with the designed curriculum. Pre and posts tests would be used to evaluate student performance and compare the two. After the study is over, schools could use the results to evaluate their own curriculum to include more autonomy in the classroom if it provides to be beneficial. Other research could also be conducted to see if increased student autonomy has a positive benefit for students in the long term.
It is believed that this research project would prove that increasing student autonomy will positively impact student performance in the classroom. When someone uses this project, the conversations and conferences had with students should push instruction and mini-lessons created by the teachers so the actual makeup of the curriculum will be different for each classroom and student. Autonomy is not something that can be pregenerated and scripted. Instead, it has to be created with the students to provide personalized rationals and responses to criticism. Due to this individualization, it is believed that including autonomy centered activities will be beneficial to the children in the classroom.
It is recommended that this research plan is implemented in a variety of fourth grade classrooms to test its validity first. While some schools may show that increasing student autonomy increases student performance, it is possible that this relationship does not hold true for all schools and students. Therefore, more research needs to be done. Furthermore, curriculums that increase student autonomy should be created for all the grades. In particular, this would be beneficial to implement in a high school setting to see how it changes students performance during a time when students are struggling to get more autonomy. Studies that also look at the long term effects of increased autonomy or how student performance responds if students are placed in a placement that then restricts student autonomy.
The completed masters project took an indepth look at developing a year long ELA curriculum that increased student autonomy for fourth grade students. Increasing student autonomy is important because it increases student engagement and, thus, performance. This curriculum gave students the opportunity to work on their own reading and writing projects while the teacher set up conferences to tailor the rationale of the assignments and allowed students to voice critiques. Throughout the year, opportunities for autonomy would include providing students choices, rationale for what is being taught, and an opportunity for students to voice their displeasure. Research shows that giving students these three things will increase their engagement in the classroom.
