Written and oral communication has been listed as the top explicitly requested skill by employers for a long time. Despite pressure from industry, the gap still exists between the expectations and average written and oral communication skills of current information technology/information systems graduates. This paper addresses the above issues and…

Educators agree that developing critical thinking skills is a key goal of college education. While the literature on higher-level thinking emphasizes the significance of writing for developing such skills, teachers often receive little guidance about the kinds of writing assignments that can prove most beneficial for helping students to develop…

A writing-across-the-curriculum and ethics component is presented for a second-semester, physical chemistry course. The activity involves introducing ethical issues pertinent to scientists. Students are asked to read additional material, participate in discussions, and write essays and a paper on an ethical issue. The writing and discussion…

The book introduces readers in the often-overlooked math-related fields to the ideas of writing-to-learn (WTL) and writing in the disciplines (WID). It offers a guide to the pedagogy of writing in the mathematical sciences, and gives theoretically grounded means by which writing can be used to help undergraduate students to understand mathematical…

We present a writing task designed to increase students' awareness of chemistry-specific writing practices. This easy-to-use-and-grade task requires students to evaluate 10 short passages, a table, and a figure, representative of excerpts from Introduction, Experimental, Results, and Discussion sections of a journal article. Most of the items…

The authors describe a graduate capstone accounting class as a basis for building communication skills desired by both accounting practitioners and accounting faculty. An academic service-learning (ASL) component is included. Adopted as a required class for a master of science degree in accounting at two universities, this course supports…

The authors investigated whether a series of mini prewriting assignments linked to a formal paper describing an original research project would improve preservice elementary teachers' writing abilities in a science context. They compared 38 final reports from students who completed the prewriting assignments with 38 reports randomly selected from…

Throughout the decades, writing has been recognized as a process that helps learners to think more deeply about ideas and information they encounter through reading, listening, viewing, and physically experiencing the world around them. "Discovery writing," the type of writing over which students have some control of the format, topic, purpose,…

Presents sample writing assignments that enable students to practice social studies skills. Suggests that the use of creative writing assignments allows students to make a jump in time or place to the era and area being studied. Argues that using the imagination is a better approach to learning than memorizing facts. (DK)

This 27-minute videotape joins a third-grade class as they discover local history by looking into the community for ideas, by exploring their families and neighborhoods for oral history, and by writing as a way of recording what they learn. It shows how teachers think about how to use language skills for learning and how to make use of local…

Pupils need variety in their writing experiences, and social studies writing involves writing across the curriculum as well as stressing positive attitudes and feelings of the learner. Subject matter should come from the pupil, and diverse learning opportunities should assist the pupil in acquiring the relevant facts, concepts, and main ideas…

Describes an effort to provide students in an introductory human anatomy course with an experience that both allows them to be creative with the facts they are learning and to be supported throughout the writing process. (ZWH)

Presents results of a project examining the effects of writing to learn in elementary social studies. Explains that the research explored journal writing activities as a means of improving social studies achievement, writing fluency, and communication. Concludes that journal writing does increase writing fluency and learning retention. (DK)

Describes various types of writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs and issues in program implementation, examines the implications of WAC programs for teaching basic writers, and outlines some instructional strategies that can be used by teachers to prepare basic writing students for participation in WAC programs. (PAA)

Suggests that developmental writing courses that emphasize transactional writing with assignments directly related to general education courses increase the motivation of students to take the developmental writing assignments seriously, realize that writing skills contribute to academic success, and transfer these writing skills to the written…