Writing is a fundamental skill for students to develop. A learning environment should be in evidence which assists students to achieve more optimally in writing. Writing activities should be interesting, purposeful, meaningful, and provide for individual differences. Students need stimulating learning opportunities involving a variety of purposes…

Student-professor conferencing and students' increased self-reflection are two of the unexpected benefits of portfolio assessment. While self-reflection is a key component of meaningful conferencing, it is also clearly evinced in the students' rationale statements. These written reflections address the relevance of students' work to course…

This paper presents materials related to an introduction to communication studies course, a sophomore-level course at Concordia College, Minnesota. The paper begins with discussions of the course philosophy and implementation, noting that the course design is based on a trajectory through three major units of study--definitions and processes of…

This book provides about 130 short, easily-prepared activities to supplement the longer teaching procedures that make up the main body of an English course. Suitable for elementary to advanced levels, the activities presented in the book can serve as a quick warm-up for the students, an idea for a brief vocabulary review, a light filler to provide…

A doctoral student's interest in self-culture connections led her to observe an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing class focused on autobiography and read all the students' papers. Autobiographical writing not only gives ESL students a chance to write about what matters to them, but the teacher can capitalize on students' cultural…

Describes an effective and efficient method to induce students to do physics homework. (CP)

This essay reflects on the ways in which the events of 9-11 offered those in the humanities an opportunity to demonstrate the many and varied gifts the disciplines have to offer a postmodern world that, for all its technological wonder, is still, ultimately, utterly dependent on food for the soul--the sort of nourishment that the liberal arts…

In traditional programming courses assignments usually consist of problems that are somewhat closed in nature. That is, students are usually given a rigidly defined problem statement and are provided with a set of data that they are to use to test their program to produce a unique result. While this approach makes evaluation easy, it discourages…

The orientation of this paper is toward conceptualizing the ideal study guide. Preliminary sections discuss the general functions of a study guide--to map out a course, breaking it down into assignments of manageable size, and to direct and assist the student in learning the content of each assignment. The general role of an assignment also is…

The material reviewed in the 37 articles and papers listed here suggests that responsibility for establishing and maintaining standards for writing among college students is a college-wide burden. The articles are of two kinds: some deal directly with the questions of interdepartmental responsibility for teaching writing; others touch on the…

Students in four university classes in educational psychology were used as the target population to study the effect of two factors, degree of effort exerted studying a subject, and written feedback from the instructor, on the cognitive and affective attitudes these students formed toward the subject and their assignments. The students, unaware…

To aid in the understanding of "cases" for writing (defined as highly focused situations in which students assume a role that demands writing to specific audiences and for utilitarian purposes), this paper begins by outlining the problem case faced by the author: to present a convincing argument for the use of the case approach to composition. It…

This document consists of a study guide and instructional materials for West Virginia University's telecourse on child development titled "The Growing Years." Included are orientation materials (including course objectives, course materials lists, course requirements), a broadcast schedule for the 30 showings, an assignment sheet, format sheets…