Description and Implementation

The evidence from Phase One revealed that student-created, deeper thinking questions did
appear to have a positive effect on student comprehension when reading a literature selection.
Since the data revealed that the intervention was not the overwhelming success I had hoped it
would be, I decided to fine tune the intervention for Phase two, rather than move in a different
direction completely. Therefore, the action research question remained the same: In what ways
do student-created Depth of Knowledge (DOK) questions affect levels of student thinking in
reading instruction?
More specifically in Phase two, the intervention focused more on increased teacher scaffolding
that consisted of working with each student to improve upon their student-created DOK
questions and help them to develop them into a higher level questions, ideally DOK Level 3.
Week 1:
For Phase Two I focused my instruction on three essential pieces of Depth of Knowledge that
built on my first phase of inquirys findings. Before students began reading The Stranger by
Chris Van Allsburg, I presented them with the important questions I wanted them to think about
when reading The Stranger in order to make their DOK question at the end the very best it could
be. The following information remained on the white board throughout the three weeks of Phase
Two for my students to reference whenever necessary.

To begin Phase Two, I had my students engage with The Stranger in multiple ways to fully
understand the authors meaning. I used the same teaching strategy from the second half of my
Phase One because the data from my teacher observations indicated that students had a much
more thorough understanding of a story after many different types of encounters with it.
On the first day of my second phase of inquiry, I had my students individually do a picture walk
of The Stranger and share questions that arose or that they considered while looking at the
storys pictures. This sparked my students interest in reading The Stranger while also piquing
their curiosity for the later related DOK student-created questions. Then, students read The
Stranger in small groups with each student reading a page and collaboratively working together.
On Tuesday, students read The Stranger individually to themselves and shared something
interesting they learned during this second study of the book.
On Wednesday, the students experienced The Stranger as a teacher read aloud. I planned for the
students last experience with the book to be through a read aloud so that all of the students had
equal access to the story.
After reading and listening to The Stranger at the beginning of the week, I brought my students
attention again to the DOK Questions instructions on the white board on Thursday. I read
aloud the required questions my students had to be thinking about when creating their deeper
meaning question for The Stranger. I reminded my students to ask themselves: 1) Does my
question add or draw on meaning from The Stranger? 2) Does my question require a deeper
meaning answer? 3) Does my question have proper spelling and grammar? I wanted my students
to be accountable for The Stranger DOK questions in this new way because it focused on
everything the students had learned throughout the process of Phase One while continuing to
develop their deeper meaning questioning skills throughout Phase Two.
The visual below is an example of the worksheet where students were asked to created deeper
meaning questions in the first box labeled Your best question.

By Friday all students had written their best deeper meaning question on the worksheet and
individual conferences began. I conferenced one-on-one with ten students on Friday discussing
the DOK question each created for The Stranger. During this conferencing time, many different
discussions occurred. For some students, I quickly redirected them to reread the DOK
Questions list on the board to better create their DOK question. For other students, I focused
more closely on creating a question that required a more detailed, evidence based, or expressive
response. I observed that my students had thought of extremely important ideas, messages, and
details from The Stranger in order to create their DOK questions which exhibited great growth in
finding deeper meaning when reading.
Week 2:
On Monday and Tuesday, individual conferencing continued with ten students per day.
Additional responses that I shared with those students included having students identify the
pronouns in their DOK question to aid in its meaning, asking why the DOK question was
important in having a better understanding of The Stranger, and identifying/developing DOK
Level 1 questions further towards higher thinking.
Below are a variety of student samples from the original The Stranger DOK questions prior to
Revision #1.


By Wednesday of Week 2, all students had completed teacher conferencing and written their
newly revised The Stranger DOK question under Revision #1 on the provided worksheet. On
Wednesday night, I reviewed all student-created DOK questions and divided students into two
groups based on their Revision #1 question. One group was for students who needed to further
revise the meaning within their question for Revision #2 and the other group was for students
who need to edit their question for grammatical errors for Revision #2.
On Thursday I worked closely with the identified group of students needing to revise their DOK
question in terms of deeper meaning. During this time, the remaining group of students worked
collaboratively to help each other identify and fix their grammatical errors such as missing
punctuation, excessive use of pronouns, capital letters, correct academic language, etc. At the
end of Thursdays language arts session, all students had their final revision completed and
approved by me on The Stranger DOK questions worksheet. Some students final product of
their DOK question was under Revision #2 or Revision #3 depending on how the
development of their question occurred. The students were able to visually review their progress
and development of their DOK question for The Stranger on their worksheets. I observed this to
be meaningful and prideful for my students as they would share things like, Miss Henderson
look how much better my question got! or Yeah, this question is way better now Miss
Henderson.
Below are the same student samples from the revision process of The Stranger DOK questions,
including the final revised student-created question for The Stranger.





On Friday students posted their final revision of The Stranger DOK questions on my class blog.
The students best deeper meaning questions for The Stranger can be found here.

Week 3:
Starting on Monday, the students and I collaboratively began to level each of their DOK
questions for The Stranger. I created a Word Document with all of the students deeper meaning
questions, removing student names to avoid any self-esteem issues or biases. The class worked in
two smaller groups identifying the DOK Level of ten questions per day divided into five
questions per group for The Stranger. When students would identify a DOK Level for a question,
I would challenge them to share their reasoning and support their thinking. If students within our
question analyzing group did not agree, the students would explain why their DOK Level
connected to the given question, and then a group vote would take place to officially decide that
questions DOK Level. This exercise truly engaged my students in effectively using the DOK
charts to support their thinking and analyzing the amount of meaning a student-created question
had. After Wednesdays language arts session, all student-created DOK questions for The
Stranger had been leveled based on Webbs DOK model, and I posted each deeper meaning
question under its designated DOK Level on Wednesday after school.
During Thursdays language arts session, students did a gallery walk of their progress in creating
deeper meaning questions based on a piece of literature. The students were given the opportunity
to study the DOK wall charts plethora of student-created questions for Jumanji, Zathura, and
The Stranger. Interestingly, during this time some students questioned where their DOK question
for The Stranger was leveled. This created great conversation for the class as a whole, and we
reevaluated those questions a second time to validate their DOK Level placement. A few of the
student-created DOK questions for The Stranger were moved to higher DOK Levels after these
discussions which offered me the opportunity to educate the students on the importance of
revisiting and double checking decisions/work to better their learning.

To finalize the second phase of my inquiry based on The Stranger, the whole class answered
their student-created DOK questions in Q&A form on Friday. This activity presented my
students comprehension skills and growth over the last two phases of inquiry entirely, and I
observed that my students enjoyed being asked challenging questions which required higher
level thinking.

Results:
Throughout the process of Phase Two, I triangulated the data through a variety of sources that
coincided with Phase One. I chose to use the same data forms in order to track my students
higher order thinking progress and growth more succinctly between both phases. My data
consisted of the following:
(1) Student writing prompts:
For this second phase of inquiry, student writing prompts were first collected on The Stranger:
DOK Questions worksheet in order for students to revise their deeper meaning questions at
different stages during Phase Two. Then, students continued to use my class blog as their
publication resource for student-created deeper meaning questions on The Stranger. However,
students only posted their final revision DOK question for The Stranger on Miss Hendersons
blog in order to show their best academic selves to the multiple audiences of the internet world.
The students postings of their deeper meaning questions based on The Stranger can be found
here. The results of this new process of having students create and revise their deeper meaning
questions on paper prior to posting on my blog resulted in instantly understandable and
meaningful DOK questions about The Stranger. The student work data from The Stranger:
DOK Questions worksheet created influential results because I was able to visually follow the
improvements each student made on their DOK question for The Stranger based on the basis of
their best question and the Revision #1, #2, or #3 which followed. The students work data
posted on Miss Hendersons blog was also important because it was the foundation for the
classs collaborative DOK leveling of each student-created DOK question based on The
Stranger.
(2) Teacher observation/evaluation:
Through my students postings of The Stranger DOK questions on my class blog, I was able to
graph each students growth for creating deeper meaning questions based on a piece of literature,
in this case The Stranger. I used the same DOK wall chart as in Phase One to display student
progress which represents Webbs four levels of DOK.

The students and I analyzed their student-created questions for The Stranger based on these
DOK levels in small groups. The results of our classs collaborative DOK level identification of
each student-created question for The Stranger are presented in the graph below.

The student-created deeper meaning questions for The Stranger from my 28 fourth graders
consisted of:
1 DOK Level 1 question
2 questions between DOK Level 1 and DOK Level 2
9 DOK Level 2 questions
2 questions between DOK Level 2 and DOK Level 3
14 DOK Level 3 questions
These results showed an extensive increase of DOK Level 3 student-created questions in my
second phase of inquiry which was a substantial success for my students. At the end of Phase
Two and The Stranger, only 11% of my students were creating questions that required simple
recall thinking at DOK Level 1, while 89% of my students were at least creating questions about
The Stranger that require deeper thinking at a DOK Level 2 or higher. Prior to my second phase
of inquiry, only 6 students created DOK Level 3 questions based on Zathura; however, the
results of my teacher observation form show that 14 students or 50% created DOK Level 3
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DOK Question: Jumanji
DOK Question: Zathura
DOK Question: The Stranger
questions for The Stranger in Phase Two which is double the number from Phase One. These
results were very exciting to review because my students growth in deeper meaning thinking
and reading comprehension really soared throughout my second phase of inquiry. Also, 46% of
my students deeper meaning questions for The Stranger increased a DOK Level which
represents their further development of higher level thinking in reading. 46% of the remaining
students deeper meaning questions for The Stranger remained at the same DOK Level as their
last student-created question for Zathura. This result showed that the students were maintaining
their depth of knowledge understanding in terms of reading; however, by using the student-
created question data solely, their growth in higher level thinking was not demonstrated.

The DOK wall chart and teacher observation form via the graph above were both useful
resources in following and measuring student growth throughout both phases of my inquiry.
These results from Phase Two of my inquiry show an increase in students deeper meaning
questioning skills, and higher level thinking overall in reading. Student progress in terms of
reading comprehension has greatly improved with these results as evidence.

(3) Responses to the student DOK inquiry feedback form:

To complete Phase Two of my inquiry, I administered the same student survey from Phase
One in order to see the overall development of my students feelings towards deeper meaning
thinking and questioning about literature. The pre-intervention surveys of Phase Two are in
red on the graph below and the post-intervention surveys of Phase Two are represented in
green.

How Comfortable Do You Feel Creating Deeper
Meaning Questions About Literature?

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Feedback 4/1/14
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Feedback 5/19/14
The results of the students comfort for the survey were rated on a 1-4 scale, 1 being not
comfortable at all and 4 being extremely comfortable. By the end of my Phase Two intervention,
56% of my students attitudes and comfort towards creating deeper meaning questions about
literature positively increased. 24% of my students answered that they were extremely
comfortable (scale 4) with creating deeper meaning questions about literature pre-intervention
and post-intervention of Phase Two. Also similarly, 20% of my students answered comfort level
3 for both the pre and post intervention surveys for Phase Two. The results of these student
feelings and comfort creating deeper meaning questions about literature present that all students
either increased or maintained their confidence in higher level thinking during the second phase
of my inquiry with The Stranger. When I opened the class up for discussion based on these
results at the finish of Phase Two, oral student feedback also suggested that students felt they had
greatly improved their reading comprehension skills by finding the deeper meanings of a story
when reading.