This study focuses on a new classroom assignment known as the Showcase Assignment created by the researcher to reduce public speaking anxiety. This paper focuses on a qualitative study. College students enrolled in public speaking courses identified what about the course gave cause for anxiety and asked them to give their opinions on the…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between student beliefs regarding instructor-imposed activities to encourage student use of course textbooks and Life Orientation (i.e., dispositional optimism or pessimism). A convenience cluster sample (n = 105) was obtained from students taking summer classes at a regional state…

The literature of the contact zone has done an excellent job of elucidating the ethical demands of the classroom as a hybrid space of variously raced, classed, and gendered subjects discursively engaging across multiple identity boundaries. But a chief concern of one writing teacher is whether and how writing teachers can revise the symbol systems…

The academic setting for many students is frightening, but it is especially so for students with a strong religious background. For such students, the academic atmosphere is, at best, not neutral but empty of teachers and classes that would encourage them to deepen their religious resources. In a "Point of View" essay in the "Chronicle of Higher…

Two hypotheses were posed in a study that examined the communicative consequences of structured versus nonstructured tasks on subjects with varying levels of communication apprehension (CA): (1) task structure and level of CA will interact to predict behavioral disruption in dyads, and (2) CA and evaluation will interact to predict behavioral…

Embedded in a sensitive instructional context rather than a stifling testing atmosphere, diagnostic lessons provide assessment that is reliable, practical, valid, and efficient. In this type of assessment, there are several determiners of instructional placement: (1) students' propensity to adapt strategies as a result of specified instruction,…

The common thread that runs through the activities in a literacy course for undergraduate preservice teachers is text. One such activity is a literacy autobiography in which students focus on themselves as learners and teachers. Students are treated as professionals and make their own decisions about how they want to present themselves to their…

Based on research using participant and nonparticipant observation in a natural setting, a study examined how teaching practices, classroom conditions, and student differences influenced the design of writing lessons in 14 English classes in five inner city schools. Data were collected from five sources--interviews, writing samples,…

This study had three purposes: to compare the concerns of student teachers in a full semester program with the concerns of those in an eight-week, block program; to apply a factor analytic approach to the classification of student teacher concerns; and to determine the level and direction of changes in concerns as a result of experiences during…

Strange as it may seem, the classroom is not, by and large, accepted within the composition discipline as a scene for genuine knowledge-making and theory-building. Teachers should go back to the "concrete materials" from which knowledge and theory are made. An example of what can be learned in the classroom comes from an effort to…

This research investigated the effects of employing fixed, variable, and extended token exchange periods for back-ups on the completion and accuracy of daily assignments for a total fifth and sixth-grade class. The results indicated that, in general, a higher percentage of assignments was completed when the number of days between point exchanges…

If personal writing empowers students to hear their own voices and to "see themselves as writers," then personal writing has value for basic writing students, whose voices have tended to be silenced and who see themselves as anything but writers. From hearing their voices in writing, and from identifying multiple sources and rhetorical…

To prepare students to live in a diverse world, writing teachers must create a non-threatening environment in their classrooms and introduce the issues of race, ethnicity, and class in reading and writing assignments. One assignment that a writing teacher used successfully both in a writing workshop course for less proficient writers and in a…

A study examined the extent to which literacy tasks were emphasized within a fourth-grade social studies classroom. Subjects, 21 fourth-grade students and their teacher at a private K-8 elementary school located in an urban area of the east, were observed over a 7-week period as they conducted a thematic unit on liberty. Data included audiotapings…