The Internet is a significant information resource for students due to the ease of access it allows to a vast amount of information. As the quality of the information on the Internet varies, it is important that students are able to evaluate such information critically. The aim of the study was to investigate how students evaluate Internet sources…

For fifteen years, the presenter has engaged college students in discussions and writing assignments that pertain to the outstanding characteristics of their most effective teachers--"effective" meaning that these teachers made the most significant impact on their lives. Based on those recurring themes, the conclusion is that effective teachers…

Encouraging literacy and academic success among English language learners (ELLs) is becoming an increasingly common challenge for educators. In the course of the authors work of training teachers or providing training for implementation of materials, they have found that the resources of the school library media center are invaluable for helping…

The University of Florida is a large research institution with a freshman class of more than seven thousand students out of a total enrollment of about fifty thousand. Although a partnership with the University Writing Program has allowed the Libraries to reach almost four thousand students this past academic year, certain barriers still exist.…

Since the emphases of physical education teacher education (PETE) programs can be linked to quality K-12 instruction, embedding Physical Best (PB) materials into existing PETE curricula can be a practical means of addressing the obesity crisis in the public schools. The PB program is a comprehensive, health-related fitness education program that…

The article reports phase 1 of a two-year study that focused on seeking and use of information by students at various stages of their secondary education. The project used a large qualitative sample selected from four Australian schools and was undertaken during 2006 as part of a wider project concerned with using information creatively and…

For several years children at Joyce Public School have been rewriting traditional stories from localized cultural and linguistic perspectives, creating innovative, individualized narrative forms with digital technology. Our experimental multiliteracies research project is a collaboration of school and university teachers and researchers following…

Television commercials and print ads have proven to be an effective means of introducing composition students to strategies for analysis and writing. They rely heavily on the eye to interpret images quickly according to fairly reliable habits. They are naturally occurring forms of argument and students have substantial intuitive competence with…

The academic setting for many students is frightening, but it is especially so for students with a strong religious background. For such students, the academic atmosphere is, at best, not neutral but empty of teachers and classes that would encourage them to deepen their religious resources. In a "Point of View" essay in the "Chronicle of Higher…

An instructor of an undergraduate literacy methods course included a portfolio as a component of assessment. Based on a review of the literature and the elements of the portfolio assessment program used in the General College Program at the State University of New York College at Fredonia, the instructor adapted the portfolio process for her…

Composition teachers and researchers recognize the difficulty young writers, especially females, face as they enter postsecondary education and attempt to learn the language of the academy. Addressing academic audiences "takes confidence and authority, qualities that are often challenged in women because of their historical exclusion from and…

Recent discussions of teaching composition in the context of cultural studies have begun to consider the condition of the writing subject in society, yet these discussions construct student-writer S(s)ubject(ivitie)s at the poles of modernist-identity and postmodern-difference binary opposition that is politically problematic. The identity of the…

This digest discusses expressive writing and the expressive mode, which is seen as a recurring stage in a writer's process of writing. The digest suggests that by structuring expressive writing activities and correlating them with particular stages of the writing process, a teacher can draw the natural linguistic activity out of a student. The…

This paper asks what role "play" plays in writing and how it can help a writer, whatever dread, boredom, skill, or ethnicity he/she brings to writing. Some of the ideas in the paper come from Africa, courtesy of Robert Farris Thompson. In his "philosophy of discourse" discussed in the paper, Thompson speaks of the "big…

A continuing concern of theorists in composition and rhetoric has been the problem of how to design effective writing assignments. With the recent movement in writing assessment from objective tests to writing samples, this problem has become even more important for those who produce "tests" designed to elicit writing samples. A study…