The SALG website is a free course-evaluation tool that allows college-level instructors to gather learning-focused feedback from students. Anyone may register and use the site. Once registered on the SALG site, you can: Create and use a SALG survey to measure students' learning gains in your course and their progress toward your course's learning goals. Create and use an optional baseline survey to discover students' starting point relative to course goals.
We chose this case study because it is an example of a teacher who noticed a group of pupils were falling behind in a particular subject and how she went about closing the attainment gap.
The teacher, an ethnic minorities achievement grant (EMA) co-ordinator, set out to investigate why the students of Pakistani origin could achieve Level 5 in English in the KS3 SATs, but not in Science.
She found that the EAL learners felt they needed:specific teaching of key wordsa scaffolding for writing up practical work.
Many of the students identified new vocabulary as a problem.
The students suggested they would like dictionaries that gave specific scientific definitions of words.
The students also found writing in science difficult because they were unsure how to write up practical work.
The EMA teacher together with the science teachers developed a range of teaching and learning materials for two Year 7 groups based on the students' comments.
The EMA teacher evaluated the impact of these strategies through student comment, end of module tests and classroom observations.
Staff noticed that teaching the students specific keywords helped the students improve their oral contributions, and that the students were more likely to use the correct vocabulary in their group discussions.