This digest looks at research findings and instructional applications of effective teacher presentation skills. Research has identified five critical skills: eliciting frequent responses, maintaining an appropriate pace during the lesson, maintaining attention, monitoring student responses and adjusting the lesson, and ensuring all students an…

This digest looks at research findings and instructional applications concerning lesson structure for teacher directed initial instruction of mildly handicapped students. Research has identified seven critical elements of teaching method: gain the learner's attention, review relevant past learning, communicate the goal of the lesson, model the…

This ERIC digest discusses the theoretical basis of case teaching and examines its strengths and limitations as a tool for teacher education. Case teaching presents authentic, concrete teaching problems for students to analyze. The study of a classroom fight, for example, might draw discussion of racial, ethical, political, and other community…

With the purpose of highlighting the lessons to be learned from immersion programs, this digest presents selected findings from research carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of immersion programs in Canada and the United States. These lessons are related to the importance of: (1) integrating language with content instruction (when second…

This brief paper summarizes research on effective instruction in writing for students with learning disabilities. It finds that three components stand out as methods that reliably and consistently lead to improved outcomes in teaching expressive writing to these students. These components are: (1) adhering to a basic framework of planning,…

There has been a longstanding interest among second and foreign language educators in research on language and the brain. By understanding how the brain learns naturally, language teachers may be better able to enhance their effectiveness in the classroom. This digest examines current brain research and discusses its implications for second…

This digest presents recommendations from the U.S. Department of Education's Hispanic Dropout Project for school practices that promote the academic achievement of Hispanic youth, and it supplements the recommendations with examples from case studies. Each Hispanic student should have an adult in the school committed to nurturing the student's…

This digest explains how functional language instruction can be made useful for persons with moderate to severe disabilities who are also culturally and linguistically different. It further explains how vocabulary and cultural information of the Spanish-speaking student can be included in functional language instruction for students who are from…

Schools and school districts across the United States are establishing and expanding foreign language programs. Although most programs are found at the secondary school level, an increasing number are being established in elementary schools. A survey by the Center for Applied Linguistics indicates that 31% of U.S. elementary schools are offering…

Several recent investigations have suggested that students need help with their notes, as even successful students may fail to record many ideas communicated by the lecturer. Results also suggest that there is value in having students participate in the notetaking process in that they are more likely to remember what they have noted, even if full…

This digest, based on a book of the same title, summarizes relevant research and promising practices in the strategic processing of text, both narrative and expository, by students with learning disabilities. For narrative text, it cites studies on improving students' ability to use narrative structure and the effectiveness of teaching students to…

This ERIC digest looks at how college faculty can use cooperative learning principles to ensure that students actively create their own knowledge and work together to achieve shared learning goals. The first section describes cooperative learning and recommends training professors to apply an overall system to build cooperative activities,…

This ERIC Digest examines: (1) research related to the teaching and learning of history in elementary schools; (2) purposes of education in history; and (3) teaching practices to develop interest in and knowledge of history among students in elementary schools. Levstik (1986) stated that social studies educators should apply the techniques of…

This brief report summarizes a longer document with the same title. It reviews literature on the importance of using active learning teaching techniques in the classroom, describes what active learning is, discusses how this technique can be incorporated into the classroom and identifies barriers to the use of this approach. Strategies that…

In nongraded education, children of different ages and ability levels are taught together and make continuous progress rather than being promoted once per year. Research studies support nongraded primary education by indicating that young children vary in their rates of intellectual development and learn best through hands-on activities with…