Abstract:
This year, my classroom was allotted thirty laptop computers as part of a grant from the State of
Georgia. It was my intention to find out if one-to-one computing could affect my students in the
areas of student engagement, achievement, and awareness of the importance of math in the real
world. My action research proposal outlines the research questions, defines the variables of the
study, describes the setting and participants, and describes the details of my intervention. I
decided to conduct an action research study over a four-week period with the students in my
third-period seventh-grade math class using the laptops daily for almost every activity. During
this unit on data analysis, the students searched for and gathered data via the Internet and e-mail
and used online programs and spreadsheet software to create appropriate charts and graphs to
display the data. As described in the article manuscript, the study revealed that the students were
more engaged during this unit of study than in previous units taught with more traditional
approaches to teaching and learning. Despite no evidence of academic improvement, the students
produced more high quality work with less help from the teacher. An improvement was also
noted in the students' confidence in their data analysis skills between the start of the unit and its
conclusion. No change occurred, however, in the students' perceptions of math use in the real
world. Upon the completion of the study, I shared my findings with the math professional
learning community at my school, who offered suggestions for another study next year to see if
the new keyboarding class in sixth grade and a longer intervention would affect the outcome.