A first-grade teacher investigated the use of daily poetry readings to help students develop certain characteristics of skilled readers, including fluency and comprehension. Students in a class receiving poetry-reading instruction had higher comprehension scores and reading levels than students in a control class receiving basal-reader…

Employing a new Surinam data set, estimates private and social returns to technical, vocational, and two general-education tracks (mathematics and language). For both genders, returns to either track exceed returns to general or vocational education. Female returns to the language track exceed those to mathematics; males show the reverse. (36…

Presents multimedia tools to enhance language arts and social studies lessons. These include stories on video; a computer program for increasing reading speed; and Educast, a free online service that gives teachers access to up-to-the-minute news along with extension activities and Internet-based, cross-curricular lesson plans. (SM)

Presents a lesson plan for grade 5 social studies in which small groups of students use computers and three software programs to develop geography skills (latitude, longitude, compass reading, plotting courses on maps), create their own continents, and keep a five-day journal of exploration. Includes examples of student work. (PEN)

Argues that students must have time to experience and respond to (not about) literature. Discusses influences that obstruct this. Outlines eight ways teachers can promote reading as an aesthetic experience, including: give students reading choices; model what it means to be a reader; read aloud to students; allow class time for independent…

Investigates impact of instructional practices involving media literacy education across the curriculum by examining the work of four different teams of ninth-grade teachers. Shows that students' media literacy skills were highest where media education activities were integrated across all subject areas, where both analysis and production…

Describes a month-long project in an eighth-grade English classroom in which students (from many countries, many of them immigrants) read an array of bicultural literature, and each researched, wrote, and compiled a many-faceted Family Tree notebook. Shows how students can achieve both their own cultural authenticity and English language…

Advocates confronting controversial subjects in classrooms. Describes bringing hatred into the curriculum of a film study class. Articulates purposes and obstacles. Addresses how to handle tough topics and ways to introduce civil rights issues. Describes the final student project. States that students make a transition from consciousness to…

Describes a student-conceived, student-executed class research project carried out in a high school English class in which students investigated the issue of teenagers and the law. Notes the enthusiastic work contributed by students otherwise largely hostile to school, some of whom skipped all of their classes except English that term. (SR)

Argues that computer technology can help to engage struggling readers in meaningful transactions with text. Lists and describes seven web sites that will captivate reluctant readers. Notes three web sites that send students on "WebQuests" to transact with text in order to build knowledge. Discusses other ways to engage students in text via…

Whether grades earned in reading, mathematics, and language by 158 second graders when learning environmental accommodations were made in the areas of light, sound, temperature, design, and mobility differed from grades of control group students without these accommodations was studied. Control group students had higher mathematics and language…

Presents five curriculum guides for music, reading, language arts, science, and social studies. Each activity identifies library media skills objectives, curriculum objectives, grade levels, resources, librarian and teacher instructional roles, activity and procedures for completion, activity samples, guidelines for evaluating finished activities,…

Describes an introductory segment of a preservice course on teaching and learning in mathematics and language arts, highlighting a project using multimedia materials to explore the integration of the two. Examples of teacher candidates' insights about mathematics discourse are discussed. The larger implications of classroom discourse for…

Describes how the author and her middle school students created the Writer's Club Web Site, a forum for information, creative expression, interaction about writing, and publication. Notes how writing, revising, editing, and publishing this web site promoted student ownership of information, collaboration, and audience awareness, and a genuine…

Describes an exploration the author and his seventh-grade students undertook as they wrote essays about objects of personal significance. Describes how they examined a piece of literature (an essay) as a model for their own writing, how they spent some time talking and listening to one another about their personal objects, and how they then wrote…