Providing training for women intending to re-enter or increase their employment options in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields must address women's mathematics anxiety. Addressing women's anxiety is essential given that mathematics is often viewed as the foundation upon which the other STEM careers are built. This…

Many pre-service teachers suffer from mathematics anxiety, which hinders their mathematics learning. This can cause a deficit in their mathematics content knowledge, which must be addressed to become effective mathematics teachers. The present study explored whether positive expressive writing was better at mitigating pre-service teachers'…

Athletes in all sports and at all levels of performance keep training logs, journals, or team notebooks as one more way to learn extensively about their sport. Such organizing, planning, and reflection can play a pivotal role in an athlete's life. What's more, as communication tools, athletes' writing has the potential to be especially helpful for…

The skills and tasks in the human services field are highly connected to emotional intelligence abilities. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of an expressive writing program involving human service students in an undergraduate rehabilitation services course. The program was developed to enhance their emotional intelligence.…

Reflection is a key component of service learning, but research shows that in order to maximize learning, the reflection must be of high quality. This paper compares the affordances of three different models of written reflection in engendering students' higher-order thought processes. Student reflections were compared across axes of guided versus…

This study analyzed the perceptions of five high school English teachers of the efficacy of interactive word walls in high school classrooms. Through data collected during interviews and professional reflective journals, as well as the review of student artifacts, this article presents the themes that emerged from effective classroom teachers.…

Many studies have shown that expressive writing about a traumatic event leads to better outcomes. One explanation is that writing allows participants to successfully process the trauma. Pronoun use may be an important variable: One study demonstrated that pronoun usage in participants' narratives correlated with physical health. Results from the…

In addition to the impaired ability to effectively communicate, adults with acquired brain injury (ABI) also experience high incidences of depression, social isolation, and decreased quality of life. Expressive writing programs have been shown to be effective in alleviating these concomitant impairments in other populations including incarcerated…

More than ten years have passed since the widely publicized debate about personal and academic writing that played out in the 1990s between Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae. But the question of the relative merits of these two different types of writing for student writers continues to be an issue of concern for teachers of composition,…

This digest discusses expressive writing and the expressive mode, which is seen as a recurring stage in a writer's process of writing. The digest suggests that by structuring expressive writing activities and correlating them with particular stages of the writing process, a teacher can draw the natural linguistic activity out of a student. The…

Evaluation of the dialogue journals kept by 153 deaf students in pairs of deaf and hearing students (grades 4-12) in 10 public school districts found an improvement in the quality of the writing of the deaf students over time and changes in content and syntactic complexity. (DB)

This article describes a writing project involving the use of dialogue journals in a summer camp for students with learning disabilities. Six resident counselors served as dialogue partners. The article covers the program rationale, the project participants, procedures, and analysis and implications. (DB)

Describes the use of secret student/student dialog exchange journals with English-as-a-Foreign-Language students at Tamkang University in Taiwan. This activity helps develop students' fluency and expressive language and increases their awareness of an audience. (Author/VWL)

Reports on a simulation used in intercultural communication in an English-as-a-Second-Language/English-as-a-Foreign-Language teacher education program. The simulation created an uncomfortable cultural atmosphere, similar to that in a foreign environment, and focused on helping the teachers in training recognize themselves as cultural beings whose…