A marked difference in the quality of reading lesson plans after early childhood education students were required to use the Unit Builder feature in a web-based productivity tool (TaskStream) prompted the design of a study to measure significant changes. A rubric was created that meshed the qualities of effective teachers of literacy and the…

This report is the 13th annual survey of censorship and related challenges to public education. The primary sources of information were teachers, librarians, school officials and parents who responded to mailed questionnaires or who contacted the researchers individually. In addition, information was gathered from news reports and various forms of…

Written in conjunction with the "Student Expressions" anthology but useful as a resource on its own, this handbook discusses the writing process and the way one teacher used it in a junior high school classroom. The narrative presented in the handbook is a distillation of the different approaches the teacher tried with different groups.…

This book is the sequel to "I Learn Better By Teaching Myself," which argued that parents need to follow their personal parenting instincts and to trust that their students know what is best for themselves. Chapter 1 describes how the author's family became involved in home schooling. The second chapter describes how they set standards in the form…

In a high school writing workshop, students frequently would go through multiple essay drafts and conferences with the teacher and fellow students before realizing that their theses were incorrect. A teacher devised the "lexivision" to address this problem. Students used Venn diagrams, graphs, or flow charts to represent concepts in the…

This book identifies appropriate reading material for adults who read at levels through grade seven. An introduction lists criteria used for selection and discusses emphases in selection of nonfiction. To make this recommended list of 748 entries most useful to libraries, titles are arranged in a very general Dewey Decimal Classification. Each…

A step-by-step procedure for teaching and reviewing dictionary skills is presented. Activities are offered to support learning objectives related to the following topics: (1) alphabetizing; (2) finding entry words; (3) using guide words; (4) learning what a definition is and that a word may have multiple definitions; (5) using the pronunciation…

The Teacher as Software Developer is the name of a program integrating technology instruction, curriculum, and field experiences in teacher preparation. In an introductory education course for all undergraduate education students, a required technology lab links to a one-day-a-week prepracticum. Preservice students produce a Web site or…

Students at all levels of literacy learning can express their ideas in print. Teachers working with student writers have found that the attempt to express, organize, and understand personal experience is also a powerful language learning device. When students publish their writings, they can see their own thoughts and concerns, and those of others…

This student magazine created by the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classes of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) is a collection of personal opinions, reports, and creative writing with illustrations. Each item was written as a voluntary collaboration, homework, or classwork. Items include poems, letters, accounts of…

An experiment in teaching French in Sweden was based on a version of a Council of Europe proposal for a core language curriculum consisting of basic needs for language functions, notions, topics, vocabulary, and grammar. The model targets a variety of learning and age levels, but the Swedish program concerned secondary level teaching of French as…

Student-designed laboratory exercises have become an important part of the physics classes at Piedmont Virginia Community College. Rather than filling in the blanks of a laboratory workbook, students are required to design and carry out weekly experiments which relate to the physics concepts being studied. Using computers, standard laboratory…

This handbook is intended to illustrate to students that they are not alone in their fear of tests and to help students reduce their own test anxiety. The handbook is a compilation of writings contributed by students who attended an adult basic education (ABE) program to prepare teenage and adult students to take the General Educational…

A study was conducted to determine whether students comprehend student-authored material more easily than the material of published authors. The Fry Readability Graph was used to estimate the readability of 8 published passages of 200-270 words, which varied from grade 5 through grade 10. The topic of each passage was listed and used in a 2-day…

Many computerized educational activities are controlled by the student as well as by the hardware or software being used. When the student can make decisions that will affect the responses of the computer, the computer becomes a tool for exploration and is not merely a vehicle for delivering instruction. Some of the activities that involve student…