Essential Question 5

The question I am thinking of asking for my research project is:  Is Brain Gym and effective intervention for improving student engagement?

So to answer my question I will want to collect engagement data.  Engagement checks and data analysis is already something that the district and school that I work for do, and I have been trained how to do engagement analysis in classroom.  Over a period of 5-10 minutes, you look at a random student every ten seconds (of course after a minute or so students will begin to be seen more than once) and mark a check if the students is engaged and an X if the student is not.  From this data collection you can get an average engagement percentage, and use this to make generalizations about the subject/class/etc.  For my project I think I will use a similar system to collect data.  Since I want to see if Brain Gym improves engagement, I will collect data for a week or so before implementing Brain Gym and then for a week or so after implementing Brain Gym.  I will collect data from the same time frame each day, so time of day will not be a variable.

By collecting data before and after implementation, I will be able to directly see the effects, if any, of Brain Gym in my classroom.  Also, since I cannot teach and collect data simultaneously I will either try to train an aid, ask another teacher to collect data, or just record my classroom and take data from the recordings.