Section 1: Academic Achievement - National Center for School ...

I had a total of 20 students. I have gained and lost many families, more this year than in any
previous year. In all, 11 students left my classroom. Many of the students that our classroom
lost were considered our transient/homeless children. When the year began I had six children
classified as transient or working with our transitional housing program. At the end of the
year I only had 3 students working with this program. I am unsure of why most of them left
Lowry Elementary. I can only hope it was because they were moving on to better situations.
High mobility coupled with lack of structure, as well as consistency, are major concerns of
mine. When compared to my upper and middle class students, I have noticed that my highly
mobile/ transient children have more attendance issues. They seem to have more attention
problems in class and many of them have poor behavior. I have also noticed issues regarding
completion of schoolwork and homework being done properly or completely. As many
teachers do, I try to evaluate my teaching style and methods. This helps to improve my
techniques to better help all of my students needs. For this study, I began to think of how I
could improve and change things to make things easier and more helpful for my highly
mobile students. I decided that I couldn’t tackle all of the concerns in one school year, but
could focus on one major element and decided to study the affects of homework on my
homeless and highly mobile students. I was not just looking for completed homework but
work that was done well, with thoughtful planning, turned in on time, and with as many
correct answers as possible.
The purpose of this study was to investigate whether offering homework help during
lunch hours, after school, or during free time helped to improve the quality and quantity
of homework being turned in from our homeless and highly mobile population. The study
was conducted with the highly mobile students in my 4 th grade classroom during the 2005-
2006 school year.
Lunch Bunch
Since the beginning of the 2005-2006 school year I had noticed that a fair number of my
students were having difficulty turning in completed homework. Most homework issues were
cleared up with simple phone calls home or conferences with parents. However, even after
these parental talks, many of the problems with homework continued with my highly mobile
Action Research to Study Homelessness and High Mobility in School Communities 40