Students who are motivated to write and learn generally pay attention to written comments on their rough and final drafts; students who are not motivated generally ignore written comments and do not use them in revision, but nonetheless are concerned about grades. One effective way of increasing student interest in writing and skill development is…

To gauge students' reactions to a teacher's written comments on final drafts of their papers, a questionnaire was administered to 197 students in six sections of freshman composition. Most of the students responding to the questionnaire were majoring in engineering, computer science, or business. Their six instructors had similar criteria for…

This study is the third in a series of reports of the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. This part of the study examines the problem that teachers have in judging whether textual signals that students use to indicate a persuasive analysis of…

This study is the 11th and last report from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. The report consists of an Introduction and seven essays, each of which discusses ways to teach a variety of aspects of reading and writing which have been tried…

Research was conducted to examine student response to the fall 1984 Annenberg/CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) telecourse experience and to determine factors that influenced students' decisions to take and/or drop the course, how they used the materials available to them, how effective they found these materials to be, and how this course…

The Basic English Skills Test and its supplement (Best Plus Supplement), a structured oral interview, were administered to 72 of 119 limited English proficient 12th grade students in the Dade County (Florida) Public Schools, to determine their oral proficiency. The students were native speakers of Haitian-Creole, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Oral…

Considerable research has been conducted on the effect of anxiety on academic achievement. The most consistent finding is that high anxiety is associated with low performance, particularly at the elementary school level. To explain this situation, some researchers have hypothesized that anxiety debilitates students' attention span or time-on-task…

A study was conducted to assess the effects of a new class scheduling system at Harford Community College (HCC), which substituted 75-minute classes twice a week and 150-minute classes once a week for regular three 50-minute classes in order to save energy by reducing student travel to college. The study sought to determine the effects of these…

To learn more about the kind of learning that occurs when students read and receive response to their writing, a study was designed to develop an analytical system by which to describe the language of writing groups. Nine writing groups were examined, two from grade 5, four from grade 8, and three from grades 10 through 12. The data collected…

This series of lessons is intended to help high school students in the Netherlands consider how they look at, react to, and judge criminal events. The first part of the publication discusses different teaching approaches used in the lessons. These include: (1) a business analysis--study of the organization and structure of the criminal…

To understand how computer conferencing can be used to meld communication and education among remotely located high-level professions, an ongoing exploratory study started to collect data from participants in an advanced adult education course conducted primarily via computer-mediated communication in the area of top level management. The…

Using such ethnographic techniques as interviews, classroom observations, and videotape recordings, a study explored the impact of two kindergarten teachers' theoretical orientations to literacy (whole language versus mechanics/skills) on children's developing concepts of writing. Data analysis revealed that children in a communication/whole…

To determine if an interviewer's orientation toward satisfaction and commitment actually produced different interviewee reactions in these two areas, 20 interviewers conducted an informative and persuasive interview with two different sets of five interviewees (physical education majors). The Conversation Self-Report Inventory (CSRI) was used to…

A two-part study intended to investigate what constitutes successful teacher response to student writing is described in this report. The described study consisted of a survey of response practices of 560 elementary and secondary school teachers who were among the most successful in their communities as judged by directors of the sites of the…

Two different methods of collecting information about student activity in the laboratory were compared using a series of videotape recordings. One method was based entirely on the systematic observation of student behavior (interaction analysis); the second method involved students describing their laboratory activities while watching excerpts…