Noting the improvement that has occurred in the teaching of writing since the introduction of the process approach to instruction, this book offers suggestions for still more improvement and for solving the problems that arise in the teaching of writing. The first section of the book stresses the importance of letting children write and of…

Teachers can develop reflection and evaluation options by keeping a classroom journal. A classroom journal is a record of the teacher's experience within the classroom itself, as well as experience outside the classroom which bears on classroom life. As an observor of one's own actions and reactions to classroom incidents, the teacher opens the…

As a commentary aimed toward revision of "Beliefs About Technology and the Preparation of English Teachers: Beginning the Conversation" (Swenson, Rozema, Young, McGrail, & Whitin, 2005), this paper encourages the authors to focus on the multiliteracies that technologies enable as a guiding theme rather than on technologies…

A process oriented technical writing course was devised at the University of Alaska to counteract the "forms" approach and to include peer critiques and student participation in class grading. Modifications to the standard syllabus included (1) student analyses of their own writing processes through literacy autobiographies, (2) student…

Nonresponse issues are investigated for the base year (1988) survey of the United States Department of Education's National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), a national probability sample of middle schools and eighth-grade students in the spring of 1988. The total eighth-grade enrollment for the NELS:88 sample of schools was 203,002;…

This study examined the effects of family communication environment and parental mediation of television content on third-, sixth-, and ninth-graders' perceptions of realism and similarity of television content and identification with television characters. Subjects, 627 northern California students and 486 of their parents, responded to episodes…

No matter what pains translators take to produce a target-language text "identical" to the source-language text, criticism and/or translation of an original literary work cannot be the same in different language communities. That translation may change potentialities in the textual experience is particularly obvious in literature with a…

A sample of 725 out of 3,241 incoming freshmen to the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) were administered the University New Student Census (UNSC) to determine a group profile for 1990. A selection of basic statistics included the following: (1) 53% of the incoming freshmen were male, and 71% were white; (2) approximately 20% had an A or…

Teachers have the same rights as others, under the first amendment, to express their views outside the classroom. Inside the classroom, however, the teacher is obliged to meet the expectations of the job, and this implies reasonable restrictions on the expression of private views. United States Supreme Court cases have reviewed the teacher's right…

Research on interactive thinking has revealed that teachers make interactive decisions in response to students' behavior and to the flow of the activities or routines they have established based on their planning. The purpose of this study was to describe the interactive information processing of preservice teachers, and to identify similarities…

California has provided other states with an example of how not to assess student writing and has initiated a new direction in the statewide assessment of student writing achievement, a direction designed to influence writing instruction positively. Before 1987, the California Assessment Program (CAP) limited English skills assessment to multiple…

A Jungian psychoanalytic approach, using the unconscious animus/anima archetype, can explain the appeal of the romance novel to women readers through an understanding of how the romance formula fulfills the psychological needs of contemporary women as the struggle for identity in a patriarchal society. The heroine of the romance is attracted to…

Intended to help classroom teachers, curriculum developers, and researchers, this book provides current information on theoretical and instructional aspects of main idea comprehension. Titles and authors are as follows: "The Confused World of Main Idea" (James W. Cunningham and David W. Moore); "The Comprehension of Important…

A child's literary experience may be "stretched" through extension activities such as reading aloud, discussion, writing, art, music, and drama. While any planned activity can be overused and work against the intent of furthering the child's literary growth, there are many valid ways of offering the child opportunities for savoring and reflecting…

The rule space model permits measurement of cognitive skill acquisition, diagnosis of cognitive errors, and detection of the strengths and weaknesses of knowledge possessed by individuals. Two ways to classify an individual into his or her most plausible latent state of knowledge include: (1) hypothesis testing--Bayes' decision rules for minimum…