Norwegian researchers examined the value of continuous self-assessment via diaries, looking at an effective approach to self-assessment for use in developing and evaluating language learning or teacher training programs. Students and teachers kept diaries and completed questionnaires. Results indicated diaries helped teachers develop insights into…

Discusses an experiment involving 35 senior executives from private- and public-sector businesses who volunteered to be governors in English secondary schools. The business executives were found to contribute significantly because of their seniority, personal qualities and skills, time commitment, and time management skills. (Contains 37…

Examines the environmental experiences of eighth grade boys and girls in Eugene (Oregon). Students kept a one-week diary of all the places they visited in Eugene. Suggests that gender and social relationships influence how males and females interact with places in their communities. (CMK)

Content analysis was used to evaluate diary entries of six adolescents with physical and cognitive disabilities. Themes concerning daily stress-coping phenomena were identified including time and task management, awareness of limitations caused by disability, and intense, yet naive, concern about boy-girl relationships. (DB)

In this paper, we report work undertaken with a group of 11 UK teachers over a period of a year to teach aspects of the nature of science, its process, and its practices. The teachers, who taught science in a mix of elementary, junior high, and high schools, were asked to teach a set of "ideas-about-science" for which consensual support…

Using a dialogue journal during a school year helped a 10th-grade student focus on skills that build responsibility and self-reliance. The Expanded Core Curriculum (Hatlen, 1996) addresses disability specific skills that include compensatory and social interaction skills. Providing instruction in organization, time management, and self-advocacy…

Background: The widespread and diverse models of professional standards for teaching raise questions with respect to the need to provide teachers with a pathway for continuing professional development balanced with the public nature of surveillance and accountability that may accompany standards. Ways of understanding technologies of power in…

As part of a larger project, we studied how a foreign language test got discursively constructed in the talk of upper-secondary-school leavers. A group of students were asked to keep an oral diary to record their ideas, feelings and experiences of preparing for and taking the test over the last spring term of school, as part of a high-stakes…

This guidebook explores the role of journal writing in community-service leadership and learning. Specifically, it offers suggestions to community-service leaders to help engage their teams in reflective journal writing. The introduction provides an overview of the history of journal-keeping. Chapter 1 provides a rationale for the use of…

A study examined the belief that to improve education, more must be learned not only about the abilities students bring into the classroom, but also about what the students do outside the classroom. Six freshmen were instructed to keep diaries detailing their views of college life. Each subject was given a blank diary entry on a diskette and…

A topical analysis of the dialogue journals written by seven of one university faculty member's students of English as a foreign language (EFL) is presented. Examination of the first ten entries in the journals revealed five general topic categories: academic, personal, cultural, interpersonal, and general interest. The ten samples are provided.…

The purpose of this research was to ascertain the types of books read by Head Start families to their children, conditions for reading aloud at home, perceived benefits of reading aloud, and children's responses to books. Data were collected from parent interviews and reading logs. Participants included 14 children and families from four Head…

To prepare teachers who will be able to draw on caring to build a strong foundation for their professional practices, teacher education programs must be created specifically focused toward this goal. This article discusses the use of dialogue journals in a course designed to enrich preservice elementary teachers' understandings of caring. Quite…

Interdepartmental rivalries between literature instruction and composition instruction have contributed to viewing reading and writing as disconnected activities. One solution to this divisiveness is a course in "the journal as a literary tradition," which combines reading and writing in equal portions. Students first learn about the…

This research project used a conceptual framework to study television viewing as a process of communication rather than as a one way transfer of information from the set to the person. Children's own definitions of experience of television viewing/behavior were used to shape the direction and concerns of the project. As background to, and in…