In the midst of disciplinary and public debates about education at open-access institutions, it's more important than ever that institutions set a clear path for inquiry and scholarship that will meet the needs of the professional community. This essay provides an assessment of the research achievements in two-year college English, particularly…

Increasingly, teachers--but also parents and politicians--voice dissatisfaction with the divide they experience between research and practice and the resulting minimal impact of teacher education (Ashton, 1996; Barone, Berliner, Blanchard, Casanova, & McGowan, 1996). The problem seems to be perennial. More than a century ago, John Dewey pointed…

Suggests a method for introducing university students to the notion that apparently straight-forward scientific research may contain ideological flaws. Explores researchers who have undertaken debates in their literature and classifies their ideologies as either aware or unaware. (Author/KC)

Reviews writing research and practice to formulate directions for developing student writing processes. (RL)

Educational games have become the lightning rod for learning and preparing a future skilled workforce. Both the people, who argue against and for games agree that learning is possible, but what is learned is another issue. However, the claims about games for learning lacks substantial research and for the most part remains merely philosophical…

Suggests guidelines for conducting research concerned with testing English instructional strategies and materials. (RL)

Identifies 31 research topics concerning the future that geographers can explore. Suggests how various research topics will benefit society as well as geographic education. Topics include malnutrition as a cause of social instability, cultural exclusion of the aged, global firewood shortage, and vulnerability of water supplies. (Author/DB)

The arguments for and against Thomas Kuhn's paradigmatic thesis are presented in this paper as a means of discussing the appropriateness of Kuhn's thesis to the emerging composition discipline. Section one of the paper introduces the topic, noting how the term paradigm is used in composition to define a system of widely shared values, beliefs, and…

Discussion of difficulties in evaluating simulations and games as teaching techniques includes range of claims made for the techniques; variety available; lack of specificity of technique objectives at design stage; limitations of objective-oriented research; inherent difficulties of comparative evaluation against alternative techniques; and…

A total of 10 studies since 1962 pertaining directly to the use of cloze procedure as a teaching technique are initially reviewed. The reviewed literature is then synthesized to determine what is currently known about cloze as a teaching device and to identify general weaknesses in this research area. General problems identified are no real…

Observation data from 46 classrooms demonstrated the importance of context in understanding teacher behavior. Student-teacher interactions for explaining and giving directions occurred a statistically different number of times in self-paced and other-paced (group or interactive) settings. (Author/GDC)

Suggests that indirect process oriented teaching methods are not too successful with elementary school social studies students because there is a tendency for teachers to provide too little information to enable a rational child to discover the ideas he or she is supposed to learn. Modifications in the form and application of the teaching strategy…

Practitioners and theorists do not articulate the purposes, theory, and practices of social studies adequately because they lack a basic understanding of the historical background. Examples of myths that hinder research and the development of social studies as a field are given as the field's history is traced. (SLD)

Identifies and discusses current literature dealing with alternative teaching techniques in political science. Main areas of concern are methodology, theory, and values. (DB)