The teachers involved in the general education program in Boston University's College of Basic Studies have developed a cooperative approach to composition instruction that they consider a useful model of structure, cooperation, and experience for others in interdisciplinary teaching systems to follow. Their instructional approach contains these…

This book is intended as an aid for high school English teachers who want to understand visual literacy and learn how to teach it. The first part of the book defines and analyzes the basic structural devices used in filmmaking. The first chapter in this section discusses how the creative use of these devices--composition, lighting and color,…

Based on the observation that freshman composition students associate writing with pain and unpleasantness and have been given little opportunity to engage in enjoyable writing, this paper advocates a method for making freewriting and the journal central and integral dimensions of the writing class. After discussing the techniques and the benefits…

The interactions of the teaching act are extremely complicated and have not been codified for easy use; this has made it difficult for teachers to judge the teaching act. A paradigm for analyzing the teaching act is: subject matter of this nature, in this amount, for this purpose, with motivational activities and methodologies of these types, in…

Kenneth Burke's 20 ratios permit the rhetorical critic to make very specific statements about the discourse under analysis and open the way for analytic speculation. The ratio method permits the critic to describe and understand the specific qualities of practical ethical dispute. Burkian ratios were employed to analyze the justificatory rhetoric…

The rights and responsibility teaching module is one of a series of six modules prepared by Project SPICE (Special Partnership in Career Education) as a means of providing career awareness information to educable mentally handicapped students (ages 11-to-13 years). After an overview, a module profile is provided which charts the activities, and…

A competency-based methods course for preservice secondary mathematics teachers is described. Ten competencies, or skills, are identified as necessary for the successful teaching of mathematics. Each student either tests out of or works through a series of modules associated with each skill or competency. The objectives may be either knowledge,…

The teacher program described here focuses on why social studies should be part of the secondary school curriculum and attempts to delineate effective methods for teaching social studies. Specific topics in this program are thinking and social studies, multiple viewpoints as evidence, historiography as a teaching devise, developing an analytical…

This report describes the joint efforts of the Evaluation of Teaching program of the Research and Development Center for Teacher Education and the Office of Research and Evaluation of the Austin Independent School District to develop a competency based teacher evaluation system. The task assigned was to produce a system that reduced the vagueness…

With the theory that social and personal values influence the conduct of evaluation studies in education, the author discusses the impact of two major sources of such values--contextual factors, including political, social and organizational influences; and the terminology, models, and personal values of evaluators. Alternative purposes for an…

The use of photography as an evaluation and research tool is discussed, with an emphasis on an evaluative study of the ESSENCE environmental science curriculum project. The camera was used in site-visits in an attempt to portray the workings of the project and to convey a meaningful understanding of the curriculum as it was actually used in the…

The Verbal Measure of Information Rate (VMIR) is a measure of information rate which reflects the elements, features, and changes in a complex environment. Subjects rated 14 bipolar adjective pairs to indicate an appropriate description of the learning situation or information load (simple-complex, novel-familiar). The measure was administered to…

The guiding principles by which the Albion (New York) school district developed its written composition curriculum guide include two basic assumptions about the learning/teaching of composition skills and eight other assumptions that reflect salient features of the composing process. The fundamental assumptions are that writing can be taught and…

Using tape cassettes in evaluating student writing takes less time to cover more comments than does writing comments. It also allows for more personal contact with students and permits a teacher to indicate more adequately how errors can be corrected. One helpful technique is for the teacher to leave the tape recorder on while trying to provide a…

Creative dramatics or child-oriented dramatic play is a basic educative process that draws upon the learning strategies developed in children's play and relates them to classroom learning tasks. As a structured play process that encourages children to explore the world in ways familiar to them, creative dramatics relates new experiences to old…