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PBI REPORT

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ECI 546
New Literacies and Media
NC State University

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Hong Cheng & Jeffrey Brown & Min Li & Yan Wang
December 2014

Introduction

There is a famous American proverb, Tell me and I'll forget. Show me, and I may not
remember. Involve me, and I'll understand. But in the 21st century, understanding is not enough
for the students to compete in the real world. The ability of applying, analyzing, evaluating, and
creating are all indispensable for 21st century learners. Consequently, what we teachers should
do is to produce effective teaching with new technology. Engaging students to help them
understand what they have learned and be creative is the essence of what TPACK, Blooms
Taxonomy, and Schema theory emphasize. Accordingly, our PBI aims to engage 1st grade
students in a guided reading lesson with an informational text with the use of CPS student
response clickers. We want to find out to what extent using this piece of interactive technology
can help promote student understanding, increase motivation and active participation, and finally,
promote transfer of knowledge that is assessed throughout the lesson. Answering these essential
questions will validate the use of this technology in a 21st century classroom.
We were inspired by TPACK when considering which tool we should use and how we
should use it. Technological pedagogical content knowledge is an understanding that emerges
from interactions among content, pedagogy, and technology knowledge(Koehler, M. J., &
Mishra, P. ,2009). Based on the understanding of the condition of school, classroom, and our
students, we decided to use CPS student response clickers.
CPS clickers, made by eInstruction, are student response devices which work
synchronously with software designed to allow teachers to assess student learning before, during,
and or after a lesson. Teachers can ask multiple choice, yes or no, true or false, and open ended
questions. The teacher can see the responses in real time and allow them to drive the instruction.
This can be increasingly important when checking for student comprehension.

Lesson Design
As 1st grade students are curious about whatever they see or feel in the real world, our
reading content should reflect this. We chose to design a lesson about ants, which most of them
may have seen in real life. As many, if not all, students will have some preexisting knowledge
about ants we decided to use a KWL chart to capture what they already knew, what they wanted
to learn, and finally, what they learned about ants after the lesson. With the sufficient
understanding of both pedagogical knowledge, technological knowledge and content knowledge,
our goal was to create an engaging learning environment where meaningful learning could occur.
We were influenced by Blooms Taxonomy when we were setting the learning objectives.
There are three taxonomies according to Blooms Taxonomy, which make students outcomes
measurable. They are knowledge-based goals, skills-based goals, and affective goals. Since our
students are young, our PBI focused more on the remembering, understanding, applying,
analyzing, evaluating, creating in knowledge-based goals and responding, valuing, organization
in affective goals. We hoped students could first know and remember the features, habitat and
food of ants, understand the life cycle of ants and then use the knowledge they learned to identify
ants from other insects and finally build on what pre-existing knowledge they already had. We
wanted our students to participate in the class discussions and activities in order to adopt a longterm value system that is pervasive consistent,and predictable(Blooms Taxonomy of
Educational Objectives).
Furthermore, when we designed our lesson plans, we were inspired by Schema Theory as
well. Schema is used to understand the interaction of key factors affecting the comprehension
process. Schemata represent knowledge about concepts: objects and the relationships they have

with other objects (Schema Theory). Based on schema theory, we made a KWL chart to help us
find out students needs before, during and after reading accompanying the questions we designed
with the use of CPS student response clickers. KWL can guide students in reading and
understanding the text, which was composed of three stages: What students know? What
students want to know? What students learned.
Implementation
As was pointed out earlier, our PBI project related to TPACK and the Revised Blooms
Taxonomy. Also, we applied Schema Theory to students learning process. This class focused on
students reading comprehension. 20 students participated in the forty-five-minute class. When
CPS was used to power the clicker technology, the teacher generated reports for a more in-depth
look at student performance. Selecting from numerous reporting options (see table 2 and 3)
including item analysis, study guide, instructor summary reports, and more, the teacher analyzed
what students understood and where they needed extra attention. We designed our lesson based
on Blooms Revised Taxonomy, such as remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing,
evaluating, and creating.
According to Schema Theory, in order to help students construct meaning from their
background knowledge, at the beginning of the class, the teacher showed three pictures of
various ants and one non-example, butterfly, on the smartboard, and asked students to use
clickers to identify non-example. The teacher could see the result from student response system.
90% students chose D- butterfly, which meant that most of students could identify ants and led
to discussion of ant features. The teacher had students come to the carpet by the smart board and
created a KWL chart. Both teacher and students could add to it throughout the lesson. The

teacher helped students write known knowledge about ants on the KWL chart. Then the teacher
developed W portion through asking some questions and required students to read this article.
The questions were: What do ants eat and how do they eat food? Where do ants live? What do
ants life cycle look like? Then students were required to start to learn this article if they wanted
to know more.
Then the teacher used the audio digital article on ants from website
(http://www.pebblego.com/) and showed it to students using the smart board so that students
could listen to the article. Also each student was given the hardcopy so that they could see the
article while listening. Several parts of this article were introduced, such as ants bodies, habitats,
food, life cycle, and fun facts.
Relating to the second level of Blooms Revised Taxonomy, understanding, the teacher
read different paragraphs and had students speak out what each paragraph introduced about ants.
Next, each group was given 5 minutes to discuss what they had known about ants so far. After
discussion, each group came to the front of classroom and added the information to the KWL
chart with the teachers help. This is the third level of Blooms Revised Taxonomy, applying,
which means using learned information carries out a new task.
With regard to the fourth level of Blooms Revised Taxonomy, analyzing, each group
analyzed ants from the perspectives about body, food, life cycle, and habitat through drawing a
map. Then each group came in front to share their map with other students.
Based on the fifth level of Blooms Revised Taxonomy, evaluating, the teacher gave
them eight questions through CPS and showed them on the smartboard. Students used clickers to
choose the correct answers. Before they gave the answers through clickers, they needed to

underline the answers on the text. These questions were Multiple choice, True or False, and Yes
or No. Through clickers, the teacher could encourage each student to participate in this
assessment and see all students answers in real-time(see table 1). The teacher found that one
specific question was hard for over half of students, which meant that they did not acquire this
knowledge well. Therefore, the teacher explained this knowledge again and asked students to
answer the same question. At the second time, 85% students could give a correct answer.
Clickers were very useful to help the teacher know students learning progress and modify the
teaching timely. Besides, through the students response system, the teacher also could see
clearly which student had difficulties in understanding this article. The teacher could help
him/her alone after class and it made teaching more effective.
The last level of Blooms Revised Taxonomy is creating, which means that putting
elements together to form a coherent or functional whole. Therefore, at the end of the class,
students were encouraged to do a project. They were given an outline of an ant body. Students
created their own ant and wrote some key words using the defining qualities they learned about
during the lesson. Their creative works were displayed on a bulletin board with an ant hill as the
background,which would build a long-term learning environment.
Assessment
According to the question reports, 18/20 students learned how to recognize different
types of ants from other insects, 16/20 students learned the color of ants, 17/20 students learned
the length of ants, 16/20 students learned ants habitats, 19/20 students learned the function of
ants jaws, 17/20 students learned ants jobs, 20/20 students learned ants foods, 17/20 students
learned the function of ants antennae, and 18/20 students learned queen ants job. This revealed

most students had achieved the teaching goals we set through the integration of technological,
pedagogical, and content knowledge.
As can be seen, the CPS clickers helped us improve our efficiency of assessing students
understanding. Every time we asked them a question, we could get immediate feedback and
detailed response reports at once. This helped us know how much students learned about this
lesson so that we could adjust it according to the response report. Whats more, this helped us
know what kind of questions that students found difficult, and it was benefit for us to make
practical teaching goals and prepare well for teaching the informational text.
Accordingly, with the help of CPS clickers, we successfully improved students
understanding of informational text and checked their understanding more efficiently.

Reflection
This project provided us with a great opportunity to try and integrate a digital learning
tool with a guided reading lesson. As we planned on how to design our lesson using CPS
clickers we encountered several challenges. First, we needed to consider how to integrate CPS
into the lesson and use it effectively. Second, we needed to think about how to combine CPS
with teaching pedagogical to improve students understanding. Finally, while delivering
instruction we quickly realized some modifications would need to occur in the future to
maximize learning.

However, these challenges provided us a great opportunity to learn from each other.
Although we are from different countries with different cultural backgrounds, we respected each
other and contributed our ideas to this PBI project. Even though we were all very busy, we still
managed to find the appropriate time for us to discuss our PBI project via Google Hangout,
email, and Google Drive. There were inevitably some disagreements in our discussion, however,
we made consensus finally about our teaching plan, video tape and report. Eventually, we
accomplished our commission.

Appendix

Table 1
The questions and the percentage of correct answers
Question Yes APA format

Percentage of Correct Answer

What color are most ants?

80%

How long do ants grow?

85%

Where do ants build their nests?

80%

How do ants eat food?

95%

Who finds the food?

85%

Ants eat fruit, leaves, and dead insects. T/F

Which is NOT a way ants use their antenna?

100%
55% (first time); 85% (second time)

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Table 3

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References

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Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. ,2009.What Is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge?

Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1), 60-70.
(2014, November 18). Revised blooms taxonomy. Retrieved from Revised Blooms Taxonomy
website: http://www.utar.edu.my/fegt/file/Revised_Blooms_Info.pdf
(http://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gipej/teaparty.pdf)
(2014, November 18). Schema theory. Retrieved from Schema Theory website:
http://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gipej/teaparty.pdf

LINK TO VIDEO