Action Research Title

What is in a title?  Should the title for the action research paper be a factual statement, a catchy attention grabber or in the form of a question?  Up to this point I have only referred to the work I am doing as my action research.  Any thoughts?

Action Research Update

My action research is coming together very nicely.  At this point I feel like one thing I have not addressed is the title.  I am not sure if the title should be a statement, something catchy or in the form of a question.  Other than that, I feel like the research is going well.  I spent time over the summer gathering background information on the upside of writing to learn and writing to retain what is being taught.  There is a lot of research available on this topic.   Our campus is focusing on writing this year.  Our week of in-service was directed at different ways to write in all subjects.  I could not help but smile as I already planned to do this. 

I am spending the fall semester running my “experiment” and will spend the spring semester going over the data I collected and writing my paper.  My classes spend two parts of the period writing.  We write in the beginning of class to get us thinking about what we did the day before and then again at the end of class to process what we learned that day.  I started reflection journals the second week of school.  I gave each one of my students a composition book that is kept in the classroom so everyone has a place to write. 

After my students took the first unit test I was able to analyze some preliminary data.  When I compared my data from the first test this year to last school year I already see a vast improvement.  I scored the highest average in our department, something that did not happen last year.  I originally planned to have half of my classes write and then compare them to the other half that did not write.  I changed my plan just a little to have all classes write and then compare this year's test averages to last year's test averages.    I did not want to help one class and not another.  Our chemistry department works very closely. We plan together and all teach the same lessons leading up to our collaborative unit exams.  Due to this fact I am also able to compare my test averages to others in the department. 

With each passing week I have my students write more and incorporate various styles of writing.  Sometimes they write summary sentences, draw Venn diagrams, write three to five sentence summaries, justified true/false statements and other formative assessments I can use to gauge comprehension.  Overall I feel like the implementation of the writing journals went smoothly and are progressing nicely.