Children use creative thinking processes when teachers assign ambiguous rather than specific problems. Suggestions for developing questions that encourage experiential and metaphorical thinking are offered. (DF)

A survey of 190 academic departments in 34 universities indicates that considerable variability exists across fields in the kinds of writing required and in preferred assessment topics. (FL)

Describes various assignments and teaching techniques for teaching journalism students news reporting methods, news writing, photojournalism, and computer generated research papers. (HOD)

Topics, materials, and assignments are provided for 94 literature lessons for eighth grade. Subject matter includes Russian literature, 18th century literature, and individual authors such as Moliere, Pushkin, and Byron. (ND)

Topics, materials, and assignments are provided for 123 literature lessons for ninth grade. Subject matter includes Second Period of Russian Liberation Movement, Ostrovskii, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Balzac. (ND)

Criticisms of grading systems are discussed and a variation on the contract system is presented as an alternative. Students select types of assignments they wish to attempt as a "menu" and requirements are stratified according to student skill and experience level. (ND)

This report describes the technical quality of a measure of the quality of classroom assignments piloted in the Los Angeles Unified School District's proposed new accountability system. The measure was developed by the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST). For the study, 181 teachers were sampled from 35…

This document outlines the development of an American Studies learning community in which a literature and a history professor created a framework for collaborative inquiry across the two disciplines. The learning community was situated within General Education requirements, and thus reflected the freshman course level. The community was linked…

This paper is a "how-to" paper for promoting writing and critical thinking skills. Intended to be practical in providing timely and helpful strategies for fostering analytical thinking and effective writing among college students, the paper is offered as a useful resource for classroom instructors seeking fresh new ideas and approaches…

Learn how to use literature to teach students the six traits that characterize effective writing: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. This practical text gives the reader a variety of ideas and strategies for developing and integrating the traits into students? writing, bibliographies of recommended…

This paper delineates an exercise where students are encouraged to give their point of view to a quotation received (the activity is an adaptation from the Impromptu Speaking event in Competitive Forensics). The paper states that students are to explain the meaning of a quotation (topic themes may be from ecology, education, environment, life,…

Service learning discourses have often addressed questions of representation through reciprocity, asking what various participants receive from service learning community experiences. In the process of researching an article about reciprocity, a writing teacher found that reciprocity was often defined as an exchange of learning for some form of…

Not only is service learning a buzz word in the academy, but it is also a phenomenon discussed by those in private and non-academic public arenas. In the Spring 2000 semester a small-group communication class educator implemented the idea of her students completing a semester-long service learning project. This paper details the steps the educator…

This paper describes how freshman composition teachers can provide students with tools for integrating different classes and navigating the university experience by introducing students to discourse community theory and viewing freshman composition as a foundation for Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). It begins by describing how discourse…

A high school English teacher used her weekly Impromptu Poetry session to find out what 11th graders thought veterans had accomplished. The teacher developed a writing prompt that asked the students to describe a family member who had served in the military and to show what they understood about that person. Students who did not have a family…