REVISED SECTION

The 2016-2017 school year was the second in which we have systematically collected data about our lessons, events, and presentations to gauge how our constituents are receiving the information we are hoping to impart. This has been especially helpful for us in considering how to revise lessons we present to our students to ensure that they are engaged and are able to apply the content to their school lives in order to more successfully access their education.
We also felt inspired to fill in gaps in our data collection, and intend to ask for perception data in some of the areas in which we failed to do so this year.

Our 9th grade unit of lessons includes 6 lessons that we deliver throughout the semester in Health class, a required course for freshmen. These lessons focus on academic, self-care, and career value skills. We chose to measure outcome data related to attendance and academic success since these are the areas we hope to improve with these lessons. Our school schedule is set up so that we have naturally occurring control groups -- students take Health within a single semester, so we are able to compare groups of students taking health against those who are not as we examine data.

The first lesson we delivered was on Career Values. We discuss the meaning of “values” with the students, and link that to choosing jobs that are a good fit for their own individual values. Then we give students money and auction off particular work values, such as “earning a lot of money,” “being creative,” or “being a leader.” Students decide whether to bid highly on one very important value, or spread their money over several. This elicits a discussion around trade-offs and work/life balance, which ties directly to the Mindsets and Behaviors targeted in the lesson.

The second less is around Stress and Anxiety. We discuss the fight or flight response, stress management strategies (positive and negative), and the risks of long-term stress. Then we do a guided meditation with the students and gauge change in stress level from the beginning to the end of the class period.

We found that being enrolled in Health class in a given semester slightly increases student attendance rates, regardless of the semester. We believe this is tied to the lessons we deliver around values, stress management, time management, and depression, as students who have or are able to develop effective coping skills in these areas (perhaps drive by their values) are less likely to avoid school. We plan to continue to deliver these lessons in a similar way in the future, but hope to create more explicit links between the lessons. For example, how can one’s values help motivate them to make better time management choices or deal differently with stress? How can time management have an impact on stress levels? By more explicitly tying lesson content to each other, we hope to have a greater impact on student retention and application of taught skills, which in turn will, we hope, have a greater impact on the attendance rate.

Our third lesson is around learning styles and testing strategies, and we looked at academic outcomes, focusing specifically at student grades in History 9. We specifically chose this class because it is flexible and offers a great deal of student choice; the teacher creates a “menu” of options for completing a unit, and students are in charge of choosing the activities and keeping their own timeline. Because we specifically address time management and personal learning style, this class is appropriate for pulling outcome data. We found that in the first semester, students enrolled in Health did not see any advantage in their final grades in History. In the 2nd semester, however, students who had already completed Health class in the first semester did a third of a letter grade better than those who were taking Health concurrently with History, earning a B as opposed to a B-. This is another lesson we plan to continue to offer similarly, but we’d like to implement some tracking strategies for students, asking them to take note of specific choices they’ve made around homework/studying and the resulting grades, to explore the personal success with different strategies. We think that asking students to apply the information in a relevant way and report back will increase the effectiveness of the strategies we teach, resulting in higher academic achievement and better retention of study skills.

Grade Level: 9

Lesson Topic: Career Values

Lesson was Presented in Which Class/Subject:

ASCA Domain, Mindsets & Behaviors Standard(s): M:1, BLS:7

Start/End: Delivered in September and February

Process Data (Number of students affected): 65 9th grade students

Perception Data (Surveys or assessments used): Q1: Define “value”
Pre: 87% Post: 97%

Q2: Identify a job you’d like when you are an adult.
Pre: 94% Post: 94%

Q3: List 3 work values:
Pre: 2.32 Post: 2.60

*Note: The chart of perception data includes data from all three lessons

Outcome Data (Achievement, attendance, and/or behavior data): Average total days of school attended by kids currently in health vs. kids not in health: Sem 1 Health kids: 91% Non-health kids: 89% Sem 2 Health kids: 92% Non-health kids: 89%

Implications: REVISED SECTION One of 5 lesson in a unit presented in 9th grade health class. This and two others focus on personal values and mental health, so we used attendance as outcome data to see if the lessons helped students be in school with greater frequency. We found that students currently enrolled in health, whether in 1st or 2nd semester, had a slightly higher average attendance than those not currently enrolled in the class (which is one semester long). This particular lesson is tied strongly to thinking about careers (the focus is on “work values”), but we would like to weave a thread throughout the other lessons in this unit that ties it back to values. For example, when talking about ways to deal with stress, how do you values impact the choices you might make about stress management? Or impact the way in which you make choices about studying and completing homework (in the Time Management and Learning Styles lessons). We believe this lesson ties strongly to the targeted Mindsets and Behaviors, but would like to hone our pre- and post- assessments to ask questions that address those mindsets and behaviors more closely. For example, we may ask students what things need to be balanced or traded off when deciding on work values (M:1), or how their values may influence their choice of long-term career goals (BLS:7). We plan to reconsider our pre- and post-assessment questions for next year.

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Grade Level: 9

Lesson Topic: Stress Management

Lesson was Presented in Which Class/Subject:

ASCA Domain, Mindsets & Behaviors Standard(s): BSMS:7, BSMS:8

Start/End: Delivered in November and April

Process Data (Number of students affected): 64 9th grade students

Perception Data (Surveys or assessments used): Q1: Name 3 long-term effects of stress.
Pre: 1.72 Post: 2.40

Q2: Give Your current stress-level on a 100-scale (before and after meditation).
Pre: 39% Post: 27%

*Note: The chart of perception data includes data from all three lessons

Outcome Data (Achievement, attendance, and/or behavior data): Average total days of school attended by kids currently in health vs. kids not in health: Sem 1 Health kids: 91% Non-health kids: 89% Sem 2 Health kids: 92% Non-health kids: 89%

Implications: REVISED SECTION One of 5 lessons presented in 9th grade health class. This and two others focus on personal values and mental health, so we used attendance as outcome data to see if the lessons helped students attend school with greater frequency. We found that students currently enrolled in health, either in 1st or 2nd semester, had a slightly higher average attendance than those not currently enrolled in the class (which is one semester long). The data from this lesson demonstrates that kids attend school slightly more regularly when enrolled in Health class, though the numbers do not appear to be statistically significant. The perception data for this lesson always shows a significant reduction in stress from the beginning to the end of class, which we attribute to the meditation exercise we ask the kids to do. In the future, we would like to find ways to incorporate smaller moments of meditation into our Health classes (not just during the stress lesson) to give students the experience of taking time when they feel overwhelmed, in small doses, to manage stress. We would also like to ask kids to track their stress over time to help them develop an awareness of their stress management, tying the practice more closely to BSMS: 7 and BSMS: 8, which focuses on using coping skills and managing various aspects of one’s life effectively. We think that by expanding on the stress management in this single lesson, we’ll have a greater impact on students’ ability to apply the skills in their daily lives in an ongoing way.

Attachments

Grade Level: 9th

Lesson Topic: Learning Styles and Test Taking

Lesson was Presented in Which Class/Subject:

ASCA Domain, Mindsets & Behaviors Standard(s): M:2, BLS:3

Start/End: Delivered in September and February

Process Data (Number of students affected): 64 9th grade students

Perception Data (Surveys or assessments used): Q1: Identify your primary learning style.
Pre: 63% Post: 89%

Q2: What are 2 methods of studying that support your learning style?
Pre: 1.15 Post: 1.65

Q3: 5 T/F questions about study tips.
Pre: 2.77 Post: 4.32

*Note: The chart of perception data includes data from all three lessons

Outcome Data (Achievement, attendance, and/or behavior data): Average final grade in 9th grade history: Sem 1 History Grades Kids in health: 2.61 (B-) Kids not in health: 2.97 (B) Sem 2 History grades: Kids who already completed health: 3.13 (B) Kids in health: 2.60 (B-)

Implications: REVISED SECTION One of 5 lessons delivered in health, this and one other deal with academic skills. We looked at grades in History, one of the most difficult 9th grade core classes, and found that in the first semester, students taking health and history at the same time did not display any positive benefits in their grade compared to those who were taking history without being concurrently enrolled in health. In the second semester, however, we found that students who had already completed health class in 1st semester did a third of a letter grade better than their peers. We hope that the academic skills lessons (time management and personal learning style) had a positive effect on students’ performance, and plan to continue to deliver them in the future. In considering future delivery, we plan to make more specific connections to the classes the students take as 9th graders in our school in order to help them conceptualize how to put these skills into practice. We also have begun to make a point in subsequent lessons to point out how we ask students to do activities that relate to a variety of learning styles; we feel that by helping them notice when activities are visual, audio, or kinesthetic, we are giving them practice in identifying strategies for learning or studying that they can use over time to improve their personal habits. We would also like to ask student, in a follow-up lesson, how they applied study techniques from their primary learning style in recent classes, and whether they felt this made a difference in their performance. A challenge of this unit of lessons is that they happen over several months, but more linkages between past, current, and future content will help reinforce concepts to our students and more positively impact their memory of the skills and knowledge taught.

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