This article presents an argument for the "re-turn" of essayist literacy in multimedia and multiliteracy contexts. For its democratic, pedagogical, and intellectual potential, essayist literacy is too important to be removed from composition curriculum, but it needs to be re-imagined within a diversity of essay traditions, including the…

This paper describes the implementation of a poster assignment in a writing and information literacy course required for undergraduate Life Sciences and Environmental Biology majors with the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at McGill University. The assignment was introduced in response to weaknesses identified through course…

To address the challenge of developing critical thinking skills in college students, this empirical study examines the effectiveness of cognitive exercises in developing those skills. The study uses Critical Thinking: Building the Basics by Walter, Knudsvig, and Smith (2003). This workbook is specifically designed to exercise and develop critical…

In this study, teams in a strategic management classroom were given one of two versions of an assignment related to the development of a team contract: independent individual reflections on desired team behaviors versus team-level reflections on desired behavioral norms. Results of a multivariate analysis of covariance, controlling for gender and…

Selective sustained attention is vital for higher order cognition. Although endogenous and exogenous factors influence selective sustained attention, assessment of the degree to which these factors influence performance and learning is often challenging. We report findings from the Track-It task, a paradigm that aims to assess the contribution of…

Providing students with continuous and personalized feedback on their performance is an important part of encouraging self regulated learning. As part of our higher education platform, we built a set of data visualizations to provide feedback to students on their assignment performance. These visualizations give students information about how they…

This article argues that the goal of an educator is to help students realize they can be effective writers by giving them the ability to demonstrate their skills. Scene writing can make writing seem less like a chore and more like an opportunity to express ideas. As students write scenes that include both dialogue and action, they gain a deeper…

Despite the considerable attention paid to the need to increase the information literacy of high school students in preparation for the transition to college, poor research skills still seem to be the norm. To gain insight into the problem, library instruction environments of nineteen high schools were explored. The schools were selected based on…

This article introduces a four-paper cluster, included in this issue of "Feminist Teacher," in which the authors take up the challenge to dismantle the perceived dichotomy between feminism theory and practice. The authors analyze specific theory based feminist pedagogical practices, which are employed on four very different campuses with…

The authors describe a multimodal concept drawing activity designed to facilitate students' understanding of terms used within an assignment in a first-year college writing course. In this activity, students write ideas, read definitions, study images, and create multimodal representations of a term in groups of classroom peers. The activity…

The Eco-Sculpture Assignment demonstrates that art may be used as a conduit to scaffold metacognition in marketing courses. Theoretical underpinnings are drawn from the literature on pedagogy used in general, marketing, and art education contexts. The assignment is described in detail, followed by examples of learner response that illustrate…

Like sports, school is a type of performance, and the process of learning and demonstrating knowledge requires mental skills that parallel those of an athlete, such as focus, analysis, memory, and confidence. Marisa Sandoval Lamb, an English teacher and competitive runner explains the parallels that exist between academic and athletic performance…

Adopting a genre lens informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, [Halliday, M. A. K., 2004]; Martin & Rose, [Martin, J. R., 2008]), this paper explores the text-structural and lexico-grammatical choices that second language (L2) writers of German make in personal letter writing. Close analysis of two student…

Partnerships between writing across the curriculum (WAC) and civic engagement (CE) programs are not given much attention but these partnerships improve each program significantly. CE programs can borrow models from WAC for professional development and obtain support for specific kinds of writing assignments; WAC programs can find among CE…

Data concerning the prevalence of adult internet and social networking use confirm that Twitter use among adults ages 18-29 years old is greater than any other adult age group. The purpose of this article is to describe how the popular social media platform Twitter can be used as an electronic library, specifically a means of organizing and…