Argues that basic writing students need incremental assignment sequences to experience success in writing and to develop their abilities to write about abstract concepts. Describes a four-part sequence of writing assignments moving from observing to narrowing to generalizing to theorizing. (RS)

This paper focuses on the "Understanding Goals" element from the "Teaching for Understanding" framework. The study featured a one-year study program covering colonial America and integrating history, English, anthropology, geography, and the arts. The paper presents: (1) a definition of "Understanding Goals"; (2) a story of how one teacher came to…

Gene expression is a highly theoretical concept that requires advanced reasoning skills to comprehend. Often, students receive instruction but fail to replace prior conceptions and thus do not benefit. In order to investigate the reason for this failure, we used a directed inquiry activity that uses concrete analogies in both majors and non-majors…

Many music teachers across the country have learned how beneficial it can be to tap into the communities around them. The author discusses how music teachers can help broaden their students' horizons by tapping into the resources just outside their school walls. One way is by employing local talents. Another is to put an ad in nearby music stores,…

Outcomes-based curricula have become the global norm in the last decennia. School authorities have more or less left behind their old habits of either forcing upon teachers a set of content to teach and methods to use, or leaving teachers alone because they trust their professional knowledge to choose what is best for their learners. The current…

This report provides statistical data on enrollment patterns of first-time beginning postsecondary students for academic years 1989-1990 and 1995-1996. It notes that in 1995-1996, about 40 percent of all first-time beginning postsecondary students enrolled in four-year institutions (25 percent at public institutions and 15 percent at private…

Recruiters and marketers within the Alabama Community College System are tasked with increasing enrollment at their institutions. The methods of accomplishing this goal include traditional strategies as well as new and emerging ones. Unlike personnel at other institutions of higher learning, however, community college recruiters and marketers have…

Offers heresies about reading, grading, and commenting on student papers which may relieve teachers from constant paper grading. Recommends using peer audiences, deemphasizing grading, expanding and elaborating the stages of the composing process, and modeling effective writing behaviors for students. (RAE)

Claims students' use of the cliche is unavoidable and relative to culture, place, and time, and that the cliche can, and often does, communicate efficiently. Suggests six techniques such as extending, inverting, punning, and combining, that combined with some imagination, can turn cliches into small teasures. (NH)

Grounded in sociocultural theory, this study uses an ecological approach to examine how student interactions within a dual-language school context may offer affordances for increased linguistic and conceptual understanding. Using qualitative analysis of student discourse, this paper focuses on data from recorded interactions between pairs of…

This author asserts that college English should provide students with certain communicative skills that enable them to analyze rhetorical effect and produce rhetorically effective texts, including those to be read, those to be viewed as images, those to be heard, and those not to be heard. Recently, new books on visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of…

Although the role of the phonological loop in word-retention is well documented, research in Chinese character retention suggests the involvement of non-phonological encoding. This study investigated whether the extent to which the phonological loop contributes to learning and remembering visually introduced words varies between college-level…

When selecting a textbook, college instructors must weigh a variety of factors. One is whether the text is written at a level that is accessible to one's students. An important factor in this is how many technical words are used. I developed an index to calculate logodiversity, a term I coined that reflects the number of technical words and the…

Argues that if students are unable to show improvement after two semesters of innovative writing instruction, they should not be forced to continue to write essays. (AEA)

A study was undertaken in the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education to determine the number of students in remedial courses in the state's two- and four-year colleges in fall 1992; compare these data with findings from a similar study conducted in fall 1991; and collect data on which students needed remediation, why they required it, and in…