To stimulate discussion among students, an instructor introduced interrupted videos in an interpersonal communication class. The videos consisted of brief 2-3 people conversations taken from films such as "Ordinary People,""Volunteers,""Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," and "The Joy Luck Club." Sometimes the…

Many American colleges and universities have developed successful programs to help prepare students for the culture shock associated with living and studying overseas, but have been less effective in aiding students as they return home and experience "reverse culture shock" or the problems associated with reentry. Culture and reentry…

A classroom study examined a variety of informal drama activities incorporated into a language arts program. During the year, the fourth-grade students engaged in six different drama events as responses to a variety of class read-alouds. Each drama event (pantomime, tableau, town or class meeting, talk show, buddy conversation, and storytelling)…

A study examined whether the familiarity and competence that many African American students have with elements of rap music and culture could be used as a bridge to the production of other literate texts. Two high-school English teachers, one teaching at Fremont High School, East Oakland and the other teaching at Berkeley High School in Berkeley,…

The feasibility of conducting computer science courses in artificial intelligence at a small liberal arts college is examined. The following problems are examined in detail: isolation; student abililty, motivation and expectation; equipment; and faculty readiness. Providing a focus to the discussion, three issues are addressed in terms of…

The writing program at the University of California at Santa Barbara offers a class for junior and senior art history or studio majors or film studies majors, although it attracts students from other related fields such as communications. It is specifically goal oriented and works best with students who have a knowledge of the arts. The class is…

This research abstract is based on two studies: first, "Student and Instructional Outcomes under Varying Student-Teacher Ratios in Special Education" and, second, "A Case Study Analysis of Factors Related to Effective Student-Teacher Ratios", both by Martha L. Thurlow and others. The studies investigated the effects of various student-teacher…

When reading educators encounter a student's interpretation of a text that is different than that which an author may have intended, they have to determine if such an interpretation is valid according to their criteria for students. Much of this rests with educators' conceptions of the reading process and the role of the reader in the…

Students who traveled to the United States to study ("student sojourners") were asked in a study to describe their initial expectations of teacher communication. Three research questions were probed: (1) Do student sojourners have articulated expectations and norms for teacher communication? (2) Do student sojourners experience…

One of the most common communication technologies being used in the classroom is the videocassette recorder. The videotaping of students' performances provides the instructor with a form of visual feedback that can be used to reinforce concepts and identify the strengths and weaknesses of the students' performances. Past studies have typically…

Intellectuals lament the disappearance of community, a nostalgia for the small town that has supposedly given way to the anonymous crowds of the city. Likewise, scholars have talked about "discourse communities" in romantic terms, referring to a place where all share the same values. However, a more urban view of social life, in which…

A postal survey on a random cluster sample of 1,032 secondary school students in Hong Kong was conducted to investigate how much students know about the environment and how their environmental cognition is shaped by the use of mass media. Results indicated that students were very knowledgeable on both general and local environmental issues. The…

"Farewll to Manzanar" (Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston), autobiographical account of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, might be used in a writing class to help students think deliberately about race and ethnicity. Writing about the book and researching the history surrounding it could serve to…

To ask students to write and respond to each other's papers is one means of confronting the difficulties posed by radical texts such as Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision," an essay from her collection "On Lies, Secrets, and Silence." When an instructor assigns such a work, he or she places him- or…

A storyteller, folklorist, music advisor and language arts teacher uses storytelling in his classroom to inspire students to talk, write, perform, listen, and learn. Beginning with a seventh-grade elective class, the teacher (an employee of the Foxfire project and not trained as an English teacher) decided to spend two weeks with the students…