Action Research Plan

Action Planning Template
Goal: To find out why our students are not financially ready to leave high school, and if the things we teach them in high school is sufficient enough to help them get started on the right path financially.
Action Steps(s):	Person(s) Responsible:	Timeline: Start/End	Needed Resources	Evaluation
Surveys will be conducted with  teachers, admin, parents, and students to find out if they were taught financial responsibility as children.	Myself	Will send surveys out in January, and will receive back within 2 weeks so I can analyze data.	I will need surveys to pass out to individuals, computer with Excel to create tables for data.	Surveys will be analyzed to help understand why students are not financially literate, and if there are other concerns with the results, such as parents needing to be taught.
A second survey will be sent out to parents and teachers only to explore if they taught their children financial responsibility when they were younger.	Myself	Will send surveys out in January, and will receive back within 2 weeks to analyze.	Surveys, computer with Excel to create tables for data to be stored.
Myself and other teachers will give a written Pre- test for students that are involved in all three business department classes. There will be a total of about 150 students involved in the testing.	Myself, other teachers in the school, principal, curriculum director.	Pre-tests will be given the first week of January and collected that day. Tests will be graded and saved to be compared with the post-tests to be given later on in the study.	Testing material for 150 students, teachers to help give tests to students, principal and curriculum director will help analyze data when returned.	I will grade pre-tests and assign a percentage of correct answers to each test. I will then create a table with the percentages of each test taken by the two different study groups.
I will teach the financial curriculum that is required of business teachers, we will attend a marketing and finance event called “Marketplace”, and I will have speakers come and talk to students about financial literacy.	Myself, other business class teachers (including FCS taught classes that teach Dollars and Sense), all involved in Marketplace event that will take place in April, principal, curriculum director, special education teachers.	We will start our research in January starting the 2nd semester and it will run through the semester. I am also exploring the possibility of continuing the research through the first semester of next year, just to have more data to analyze, and more students.	Financial curriculum, teachers that will teach the financial curriculum.	Students will be evaluated during the semester by their grades, but the evaluation that will go with this research will be the post-test we will be giving at the end of the semester.
My final step in the research project will be to give a post-test to the students that have been involved in the financial curriculum that we have been teaching for the semester. We will give the test and analyze the data, comparing it to the data from the pre-test given at the beginning of the semester. We will also compare it to the students that did not receive the financial curriculum during our classes. I will come to a conclusion with this data and answer the question of whether the things we teach them about finance is working, and hopefully find other ways or methods to help these student gain a better understanding of financial literacy.	Myself, other teachers, principal, curriculum director.	The post-test will be given at the end of the semester in May. If I decide to continue, another post-test will be given at the end of the first semester of next year, in December of 2013.	Financial literacy post-test, computer with Excel to create tables for data.	I will evaluate all the data that I have taken, and come to a conclusion about if what we teach the students in our business classes about financial literacy is sufficient enough to get them started on the right path financially. I will also evaluate data concerning what students learn outside of school from parents, grandparents, or other sources of information that they gain. Are their parents teaching them how to handle finances correctly, are they setting the example for their kids? Are there other ways our students are learning about financial responsibility? If so what are those ways? These are things I will evaluate at the end of the study.