In addition, two fifth-grade teachers added the Wonder of the Day® to their classroom websites, which allowed students to engage in nonfiction inquiry at home with parents, siblings, and extended family members.
During the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 school years, MCR-II fifth grade students in two of the classrooms did not implement the Wonderopolis® Wonder of the day. The Nonfiction Benchmark data shown above (Figure 2) indicates no significant gains in student achievement in nonfiction benchmark skill areas of sequence, author’s purpose, text features, main idea, and cause/effect relationships based on the quantitative 4-Sight Reading data. Therefore, there is a correlation between the implementation of the Wonderopolis® Wonder of the Day® and the increased student achievement on these nonfiction benchmarks.
Next Steps to Ensure Student Success
Morgan County R-II fifth-grade teachers are committed to the data-drilling analysis process and making data-driven instructional decisions, which increase student learning and reading achievement across the curriculum and on state standardized tests. As school districts make the transition to Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Pimentel (2012) noted that CCSS focus on student understanding of disciplinary-specific texts, forming new knowledge based on those texts in all areas of the communication arts, and developing a wide vocabulary by utilizing complex texts. The Wonder of the Day®, as shown in this study, can be an instrumental resource for teachers to transition to the CCSS and to improve student scores on nonfiction benchmarks. The Wonder of the Day® increases the emphasis on informational text in a short, daily, high-quality nonfiction text that allows teachers to model strategic reading, increase student vocabulary knowledge, and support student inquiry and success in nonfiction text which may be beyond their current reading level.
Lastly, MCR-II Elementary fifth-grade teachers and students came full circle with the Wonder of the Day® in the 2012- 2013 and 2013-2014 school years. The grant money earned from being a field test site was used to purchase green-screen technology to be able to web-stream “Tiger TV News,” an elementary television broadcast, to the main elementary and south elementary campuses. This opportunity allowed our fifth-grade students to integrate technology into their everyday learning. The Wonder of the Day® was highlighted daily on the "Tiger TV News” broadcast, which was then shared and could be viewed by students from Pre-K through adults in the community.
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Figure 2