Students can be introduced to reader-writer relationships with the print world they recognize as most friendly, magazines. Comments concerning the wide range of magazines and the specificity of an individual magazine's audience should arise naturally. Teachers might ask their students to discover what textual features led to their definitions of…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an expert instructional system used to provide timely and quality feedback about the quality of a variety of visual materials production techniques to undergraduate students in a basic instructional materials production class. One group of students generated its own feedback by using the expert system, and…

Students in a remedial composition course at St. Olaf College were required to write all their papers on a microcomputer. It was assumed that text editing would be useful not only in the writing and revision processes, but also in building both confidence and morale as students mastered its techniques. The assignments were explained on Monday, and…

The Writer's Center at Elgin Community College (Illinois) was established to provide students, writers, and would-be-writers with an opportunity to share and discuss common problems and successes in writing. The group holds meetings and invites local writers, editors, and others to address them. Members are encouraged to read short stories,…

To determine what general aspects of photographs appeal to readers--as opposed to subject matter categories that might or might not be tied to events--95 college students reported their readership of three alternate front pages of the daily student newspaper. Specifically, the study examined whether readers were more likely to read stories…

This study examined the effects of the field experience for student teachers in terms of pupil outcomes. Two main questions were posed: (1) Does the reading or mathematics achievement of pupils in classrooms with a student teacher differ from the achievement of pupils in classrooms without a student teacher? and (2) Among classrooms with a student…

This study is the sixth in a series of reports from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. This report provides an in-depth look at how students use elaboration (bringing prior knowledge to a task), how much value elaborative material adds, and…

This publication reviews the research findings related to the verbal questioning behaviors and practices of teachers. It emphasizes current research related to the impact of questioning practices on student thinking, achievement, and attitudes. This includes questioning techniques and strategies, and approaches to the analysis of classroom…

There is indeed a literacy crisis, but this crisis needs to be reconceived as a crisis in definition. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo's book "Literacy: Reading the Word and the World" can be used to refute E. D. Hirsch's arguments as presented in his "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know," but this kind of…

Using data collected in Australia, the United States, and Norway, this paper discusses teachers' utilization of disciplinary techniques. Students in each country were asked to identify, from a list of 34 teacher characteristics and practices, those which were "good" and "bad." In general, the study found that the good teacher…

Reading comprehension involves making connections between prior knowledge and the visual information on the page. To reduce uncertainty, the reader makes orthographic, syntactic, or semantic predictions. Thus, comprehension is relative, dependent on the answers to different readers' different kinds of questions. The reader does not record a…

The study tested a hypothesized three-dimensional structure of test anxiety involving the constructs of fear of failure, emotionality, and worry. The discriminant validity of these three constructs was studied. Uninformed students were told about a mathematics test in a lesson just prior to administration. They were compared to informed students…

The psychological process of segmenting sentences into meaningful units or "chunks" is believed to be an important aspect of text comprehension processes. The most characteristic type of parsing task elicits perceptions of text structure indirectly by asking individuals to make judgments about pause placement in sentences. In four…

A study of relative teaching effectiveness of two groups of California high school vocational agriculture teachers (eighteen trained under full-pay intern programs and eighteen trained under traditional fifth-year programs) revealed some teacher-training implications but no significant difference between the two groups as to student perceptions of…