When campers notice the natural world around them, they can identify with nature and build an emotional connection with the environment. Creative-writing activities tied to nature are presented that can help campers enhance their descriptive and communication skills, and also learn something about themselves in the process. (TD)

Describes an in-class exercise in which students listen to a piece of music (without lyrics), and then write about their responses. Notes that students learn that responding to literature is as natural as responding to music, and that they all have valid and unique reactions and connections to literature. (SR)

Discusses the class-related logbook, a semester-long writing assignment that focuses on teaching the process of using regular writing as a powerful professional tool apart from the formal documents required on the job. (WRM)

Presents a catalog of active-learning techniques aimed at fostering student learning in the context of a lecture course. Activities range from listening practices to short writing exercises to complex group exercises. Barriers to implementing active learning, and some solutions, are explored and personal experience with the techniques are…

Identifies research contributing to teachers' understanding not only of what it means to teach composition but how it might be implemented in a meaningful and productive manner to improve students' writing. Concludes that a variety of meaningful writing tasks contribute to student growth, writing instruction is a shared responsibility, and the…

Five students (ages 9-10) with learning disabilities and severe writing problems wrote in dialog journals using a standard word processor and then using a word processor with speech-synthesis and word prediction features. The special features had a strong effect on the legibility and spelling for four students. (Author/CR)

Shows how a writing exercise requiring students to write to themselves five years into the future has a dramatic effect on them and helps them, perhaps for the first time, to think about their futures. (TB)

Through the use of a question notebook, students can practice grammar and develop their vocabulary. This class activity also helps students to begin to write and express their own curiosity. (Author/CK)

Aims to reconcile the imitation practices of rhetorically involved advanced writers, such as T. Moi and C. Bedient, with the passive imitation strategies of many undergraduate writers. Suggests a rhetorical relationship with texts where undergraduate students may also "practice" imitation, "practice" implying praxis. Integrates…

Discusses an instructional model viewing the role of teachers as gatekeepers or border crossers, with gatekeepers maintaining tight control over learning and border crossers providing students greater freedom to define their own learning experience. Examines the validity of the model in the context of using writing assignments in large lecture…

This article describes a simple in-class exercise in reading and writing that, by asking participants to write their own endings for a short narrative taken from the "Journal of the American Medical Association," prompts them to reflect on the problem of uncertainty in medicine and to apply the literary-critical techniques of close…

We examined the effects of in-class writing instruction, practice, peer review, and feedback on writing skills of undergraduates enrolled in a general psychology course. We rated writing for grammar, writing style, mechanics, and American Psychological Association referencing style. Significant differences emerged on the 4 writing skill domains (p…

Arriving college students find themselves unprepared for the demands of academic writing. Despite the sometimes condescending critical attitudes of its literary worth and the pressures of composition specialists to use nonfiction texts as instructional aids, detective fiction, like any fiction, favors the underlying characteristics students…

A study investigaged: (1) in what ways sixth-grade students appropriated language and/or themes from multicultural poetry into their own poetry writing and (2) when students appropriated language and/or themes, what factors influenced their choices. Subjects were 5 students within a class of 22, chosen for case studies because of their unique…

Short analytical writing exercises were designed to develop critical thinking and writing skills; stimulate creative thinking and writing; promote learning of psychological concepts; and to assess student knowledge. Design of these assignments was based on Bloom's taxonomy of multiple levels of critical thinking: recall, comprehension,…