This recently completed study examined whether attribution theory can explain helping behavior in an interdependent classroom environment that utilized a cooperative-learning model. The study focused on student participants enrolled in 6 community college communication classes taught by the same instructor. Three levels of cooperative-learning…

Forty-five counselor educators and 62 master's-level counseling students were surveyed to compare faculty members' perceptions of trainee competence with students' own views. As anticipated, students reported higher deficiency rates than did their faculty. Combined with the intervention rates reported by corresponding faculty, students' reports…

Whether referring to psychologist Stanley Milgram's intriguing theory, John Guare's successful play and film, or Kevin Bacon's party game, six degrees of separation may also be used as a way to help students make visual connections. The six degrees of separation is the concept that everyone is connected to everyone else in the world by only six…

As the frequency with which Classroom Response Systems (CRSs) are used is increasing, it becomes more and more important to define the affordances and limitations of these tools. Currently existing literature is largely either anecdotal or focuses on comparing CRS and non-CRS environments that are unequal in other aspects as well. In addition, the…

This article describes how third-grade students developed an understanding of the equals sign and began to use relational thinking as they discussed true/false and open-number sentences. The sequence of instructional activities and children's responses to them are provided.

For one instructor, the thought that introducing hypertext into a writing class would immediately revolutionize that environment proved to be naive. The cautions issued by some academics--that hypertext may "disempower" student writers, took on a real urgency in his class. At this point, there are a number of paradigms already…

A study focused on investigating perceptions of sexist humor, specifically on how people perceive others' reactions to sexist humor. Subjects, 206 college men and women, rated communication competence and attraction of actors in vignettes depicting 2 different reactions to sexist humor. Results indicated that sex of both the joke teller and the…

International students from western European countries attending American universities often face severe culture shock in the areas of education and personal development. The four stages of culture shock are the honeymoon stage, crisis stage, recovery stage, and the adjustment stage. Culture shock can be overcome by finding out about the new…

A study examined what critiques, if any, encourage debaters to think about their debating in the most productive ways. It evaluated oral critiques and revealed decisions as components in influencing the debaters'"self-talk" or internal dialogues as the more important messages. The study used R. Petty and J. Cacioppo's (1986) elaboration…

In an introductory-level Romantic Poetry course, a loose-leaf notebook is kept on reserve in the library to serve as a classbook or collaborative journal in which all class members (including the teacher) write comments as the semester progresses. Entries are dated and addressed to individuals or to the class as a whole. Informal entries allow…

As Martha Nussbaum argues, narratives, and especially novels, provide a way of reflecting on what it means to live well morally, and the emotional responses that stories evoke are crucial to the ability to formulate complex moral judgments. An important aspect of the moral nature of literature is the reader's "empathetic imagination," or…

Students at Westchester Community College (WCC) are a diverse and often disenfranchised group. To help these students find their own voices, lyric poems are read now and then in a freshman writing course. Initially, lyric poems are read and discussed during the first week of class. Without the fear of reading something incomprehensible, students…

It is an open question whether popular culture courses are effective sites in which to instill the kinds of critical media literacies that might contribute to students acting in support of social justice in their everyday lives. A course called "The Uses of Popular Culture" focuses on contemporary multicultural American society to…

This study examined the nature of adolescents' responses to ads and stories containing different degrees of stereotypical portrayal of females. Subjects were 115 students in grades 8 and 11 enrolled in English classes in two middle-class suburban school districts. The materials used consisted of four ads and two stories portraying females,…

Diagnosing cognitive errors possessed by examinees can be considered as a pattern classification problem that is designed to classify a sequential input of stimuli into one of several predetermined groups. The sequential inputs in this paper's context are item responses, and the predetermined groups are various states of knowledge resulting from…