iBooks Companion Books in Book Clubs

7th Grade ELA

David Bruder & Damian Jones

Problem Identified: Students are writing literary essays out of compliance without any real-world application or purpose.

Hypothesis: If students create an e-companion book that includes a literary essay, their commitment to writing will be strengthened as measured by more thorough elaboration of text evidence and more frequent revision.

Data Collection: Students will draft an initial literary essay without the intent of publishing and passing their work along. Students will draft a second literary essay after launching the iBook project. Teacher will compare data on standards (structure & development) and compare both projects.

Actionable Step:

• Launch project to students

• Split students into book clubs

• Maintain reading notebooks & logs

• Draft Lit Essay #2

• iBook Tutorials / Small groups for students

• Individual iBook completion

Overall Findings/Impact:

• Students scored higher on structure standards, which focus on how the information is visually and mechanically represented (paragraphs, punctuation, spelling). We believe this to be true because students were concerned about the audience’s ability to read and interpret their literary essay. Traditionally, only the teachers would be examining the essay.

• Students still struggled with presenting background information and elaborating on evidence. We believe this to be true because students were asked to analyze a large piece of text (novel) during the second round of literary essay writing. During the first round, students were analyzing a short story with more digestible length.