Motivation & Achievement 1Improving Student Motivation and Achievement in Biologythrough a Student-Centered Environment and ReciprocalTeaching Action Research Proposal Afrodita E. Fuentes California State University, NorthridgeMotivation & Achievement 2Improving Student Motivation and Achievement in Biologythrough a Student-Centered Environment and ReciprocalTeaching IntroductionWhat is the problem? Every semester, I am saddened to know that many of my students claim to “hate science” because it “is too hard,” “has no use,” and because “Latinos are not good in science.” It is for this reason that I have chosen to answer the following question in this action research: will a student-centered classroom and reciprocal teaching improve student motivation to learn and achieve in Biology? Perhaps the many unhealthy experiences in the classroom, the school, and the community have led students to feel helpless and unmotivated to give science a chance. Science seems to be a difficult subject for many students, especially in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Working in a mostly Latino highschool for seven years, I have seen the fear and helplessness in students who are in a chemistry or biology classroom. More than half of the students fail these classes, thus causing low student and teacher moral. I am afraid many students drop out of school because of the difficulty and fear they experience in these classes. In addition, there are many factors that contribute to this negative attitude towards doing well in science and school in general. These include academic deficiencies, but most seriously and almost unfixable are the family and community problems. Some students have enormous economic responsibilities to their families in the US and even their countries of origin. Many of them live in single family, with relatives, and even alone and in shelters. Some come from broken and abusive homes. Some students would be better off living alone than with the familiesthey have. Their neighborhoods are plagued with drugs, gangs, and rundown living conditions.Motivation & Achievement 3No matter how much experts and administrators claim that learning should not be affected by factors outside of the classroom, the reality is another. Administrators and experts avoid discussions about negative conditions and deny the negative effects of such conditions on studentacademic achievement. I am overwhelmed to know how many of my students face constant hardships and trauma. I feel helpless in helping them with that physical, emotional, and psychological weight because I am not trained and the school lacks the necessary resources for students. Sometimes I wish I did not know what my students are going through. But if I do not know, then I wouldn’t understand why a student is constantly sleeping, crying, fighting, and involved in illegal substances because they woke up with a gun to their head or they had a physical fight with their parents or their parents killed themselves a week or two ago or they were raped a year ago and did not tell anybody. Some students just hope to survive the day. Learning the daily standard is the least of their worries, for most of them. Sometimes I just give up in getting to know my students because I find out things that I do not want to deal with. I am afraid I will end up counseling and not teaching. I realize that most things are out of my hand and that the only thing I can do for all of my students are to create a little heaven of my classroom. My hope is that when students are in my classroom they feel physically and emotional safe, forget the bad things outside, become engage at least in what others are doing and learning, and lean a thing or two about themselves and the world around them. I would like my students to communicate their knowledge and ideas efficiently, seek, analyze, and use information on their own, take initiative tosolve problems, help others, work together, realize that the knowledge they gain cannot be taken away from them, understand how they learn, and use what they know to make a positive change in their lives and theirMotivation & Achievement 4community. It would be wonderful for students to understand and see the beauty of science all around them and in them. Again, the question that I am trying to answer is, will a student-centered classroom and reciprocal teaching improve student motivation to learn and achieve in Biology? My primary goal was to motivate students to learn biology. This in turn should have lead to students’ desire to learn on their own, and not just about biology. Once that happened, student learning and achievement should have improved greatly. I firmly believe that students do their best and show their best when they are the center of the classroom and when value is given to what they own, their culture and their knowledge. Students need to be empowered and take responsibility and ownership of their learning to be successful learners. To help students feel safe and comfortable learning, the classroom needs to be student-centered. Forstudents to show what they know and feel proud of what they know, reciprocal teaching can be a powerful tool to become their own teachers. Students need to be guided and supported to prepare and deliver lessons to their peers. While preparing and delivering lessons, the following are improvements I anticipated in my students: ability to select useful and meaningful information from different sources, reading and analyzing information, organizing and highlighting relevant information to teach a topic, and oral and written communication of their learning. Literature Review Learning is a process of knowledge construction, based on the constructivist model (Taber, 2001). For meaningful learning to occur, connections need to be clear between what is being taught and what one already knows. Piaget suggests that learning occurs through a process ofMotivation & Achievement 5assimilating and accommodating new information into existing organized knowledge (Taber, 2001). Prior knowledge is the foundation and frameworkfor successful learning and application of new material. Prior knowledge is the cognitive structure a learner possesses at any given time. Taber (2001) explains this cognitive structure as the set of facts, concepts, propositions, theories, and raw perceptual data that learners have available to them at any point in time and