This article describes the authors' journey as three educational leadership professors implementing a program to improve teaching for social justice. The social change agents they seek to nurture in their graduate program are individuals who are keenly aware of inequities in society and possess the knowledge, skills, and will to make a difference…

The design and development of GRACILE, a collaborative learning environment in the domain of Japanese language patterns and expressions, is described. The environment is designed to allow learning goals communication, learning activities negotiation, and collaboration between learners. From a group of student models, a potential development level…

This sampler discusses California's English-language arts assessment program and presents examples of high school reading assessments, writing assessments, and writing prompts. The first section of the sampler takes an integrated look at Year One of the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS). The second section presents the scoring guide for…

This sampler discusses California's English-language arts assessment program and presents examples of elementary school reading assessments, writing assessments, and writing prompts. The first section of the sampler takes an integrated look at Year One of the California Learning Assessment System. The second section presents the scoring guide for…

Presenting the full range of students' writing, this paper provides administrators, teachers, and students with samples of students' writing that exemplify the criteria used to score responses to the June 1992 Grade 6 English Language Arts Achievement Test. After an introductory section, the paper presents a general commentary; the writing…

Using a social constructivist theoretical framework, the case of Ella demonstrates how one fifth-grade, African-American student who participated in a writing process classroom appropriated the dialogue from social interaction and transformed it to use in her own texts and in her talk with others. During the teacher-student writing conferences,…

This sampler discusses California's English-language arts assessment program and presents examples of high school reading assessments, writing assessments, and writing prompts. The first section of the sampler takes an integrated look at the California's new English-language arts assessment. The second section presents the scoring guide for…

This sampler discusses California's English-language arts assessment program and presents examples of elementary school reading assessments, writing assessments, and writing prompts. The first section of the sampler takes an integrated look at the changes which make up the new English-language arts assessment. The second section presents the…

The current public debate between the images of the smiling war hero and of the grimacing Vietnam veteran provide opportunities to define two discourse communities that manifest themselves in students' written discourse. These can be seen as akin to the first American jeremiads, which were Puritan treatises written by seventeenth century religious…

This volume consists of nine conference papers and journal articles concerned with microcomputer applications in the teaching of writing. After a general introduction entitled "Computer-Assisted Composition Instruction: The State of the Art," by Robert Shostak, four papers are devoted to how computers may help with the writing process. In…

Bringing together an enthusiasm for biography and a belief in in-depth learning through long-term projects which include manipulating the material to be learned, this book presents a reading-and-writing approach to biography for elementary and middle school students in which students research and write biographies. Following a foreword and an…

A naturalistic study (last of a three-part project) investigated how the reading and writing of children was affected by previous textual experiences. Subjects, first-grade students in one of seven classes in a small independent Christian school, were observed for about 2 hours weekly during their language period. Data consisted of detailed field…

The instructional practice of imitation works most effectively as a developmental and remedial instrument within a writing-centered, student-centered pedagogy. In this context, imitation can accelerate natural language acquisition and encourage language competence and control, thus enabling student writers to focus their attention on particular…

Some errors in adult black students' writing cannot be analyzed merely within the traditional hierarchy of grammatical rules; a look at sociological factors is germane to an evaluation of students' writing ability or inability. Data for an analysis of black adult students' writing at the syntactic level have shown that problems of clarity might be…

Written in narrative form, a study examined the impact of using writing as a learning tool in an upper-division college course in Seventeenth Century literature. The study investigated: (1) student writing samples of both informal and transactional writing forms; (2) the impact of writing-to-learn on course objectives; (3) the impact of informal…