Collecting and Analyzing Our Data

Happy almost Thanksgiving!! As we are all packing up and heading home for the holidays, we wanted to let you know that we have finalized how we are going to collect and analyze data about brain breaks and their effectiveness. Hopefully we can entertain at least a few fellow commuters who may need a bit of light reading on their long and (hopefully) traffic-free trips home.

We have five ways that we are going to collect data during the course of our action research project:

1. Primary Behavioral Observation Chart: We will have two of these charts each day. The first chart will be filled in during the lesson directly before that day's brain break and the second chart will be filled in during the lesson directly after the brain break.

2. General Attitude Survey: This survey will be administered at the beginning of the study, before any brain breaks have been administered, and at the end of the study, after the three weeks of brain breaks have been completed. The survey will ask students how they feel about brain breaks in general and how they feel about each of the three specific brain breaks. A snapshot of the survey is included below.

3. Weekly Specific Attitude Survey: This survey will be in the same format as the General Attitudes Survey but will be given to the students at the end of each week of brain breaks, asking their opinion on that specific week's brain break (yoga, dancing, and fitness).

4. Pre/Post Academic Assessment: Although unclear on the specifics for this assessment, we are going to give a pretest at the beginning of the week and a posttest at the end of the week on the specific material being covered over the five-day period. This will be a way to measure academic success, and allow us to see if there is a correlation between type of brain break and academic success.

5. Anecdotal Notes: The observer(s) will record anecdotal notes about student behavior during the lesson directly before and directly after each brain break.

We will let you know more as we talk to our mentor teachers and find out exactly when this will all take place. Have a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving!!

An Interesting Read For This Cold and Windy Day...

Hi guys! The other day I was looking up ideas for working with kids who have behavioral problems. I have seen a lot of physical and verbal aggression in the classroom recently and was searching for ways to lower the chances of these instances occurring. I found an article about using yoga to deal with different stressors both at school and at home, specifically focusing on kids who come from broken homes where support is lacking. The article states that "through yoga movements and conscious breathing, youth are learning to be still, to focus, and to relax and have greater self-control." The article says that yoga is providing an outlet for kids to express anger, anxiety, and stress. Although it focuses on entire yoga programs and not three-to-five-minute brain breaks, I think that we can use this information to make sure that the yoga that we do with our kids specifically focuses on moves that lead to relaxation. Hopefully kids that are wound up, angry, or stressed before a yoga brain break can find some sort of relaxation after a short yoga session. Fingers crossed!!

Read the article here!

Our Timeline

Thought all you brain breakers out there would be interested in the timeline of our research.

Because some of our team is switching classrooms in March, we have a limited amount of time to work with. We decided on the following setup and think it's pretty awesome:

Brain Break Implementation

We decided to have one week for each type of brain breaks, with two days of 3 minutes and two days of 5 minutes for each week. We also wanted to have a day of no brain breaks to test our questions against. 

 Let us know if you have any questions or comments!