Peer review offers benefits to post-secondary students and their instructors. In recent years, some instructors have shifted to virtual means of student peer review; however, face-to-face peer review is still a viable option. This mixed-methods study explored the substance of peer review conversations, as well as their impact on students' academic…

This document presents the proceedings of the 25th Annual Research Forum held June 30, 2021, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following eighteen action research papers: (1) Using Modern Events to Teach United States History (Charles Ahern); (2) "We Are All ESL Teachers": Culturally and…

We introduce an educational game-based assessment that measures the choices students make while learning. We present Posterlet, a game designed to assess students' choices to seek negative feedback and to revise, in which students learn graphical design principles while creating posters. We validate our game-based assessment approach with three…

Students who graduate from high school who are college-ready are more likely to graduate than those who are not college-ready. The need for remediation on college campuses burdens both students and institutions with financial and opportunity costs that at best delay, and at worst impede graduation rates. At a time when workforce preparation skills…

The California history and social science standards-based reform has been touted as the "gold standard" for state history curricula. But the standards, framework, and tests that constitute this reform provide inconsistent and contradictory criteria for teaching and assessing history and social science. An examination of the political…

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to score student essays and support revision. We studied how an AWE program called MY Access![R] was used in eight middle schools in Southern California over a three-year period. Although many teachers and students considered automated scoring unreliable, and teachers'…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of task-based writing instruction, a communicative language-teaching method, on second language acquisition and differentiation of instruction for English language learners during the independent work time instructional component of the Open Court Reading program. Through student-teacher…

As a professor of English at Diablo Valley College in northern California where she teaches a variety of writing and literature courses, the author finds her students' essays so often lack not only shape and drama, but the ring of emotional truth as well. Their "life" stories are lifeless and their "true" stories sound somehow…

Recent studies undertaken with sociocultural perspectives on literacy offer a framework through which to explore poetry in youth's lives. This article draws upon works within New Literacy Studies to provide a glimpse of urban high school youth's experiences in a unique program called Poetry for the People (P4P). It identifies some ways in which…

An Educational Specification Committee was convened to determine the design specifications required for a new middle school in Roseville, California's Dry Creek District. This report presents revisions to an earlier document that examined school room specifications for each grade level and administrative area. Specification considerations are…

An Educational Specification Committee was convened to determine the design specifications required for a new K-5 (and temporarily 6-8 grade) elementary school in Roseville, California's Dry Creek District. This report presents revisions to an earlier document that examined school room specifications for each grade level and administrative area.…

This article links failed reform to failed education through a case study of an annual collaborative revision of a program textbook in the Composition Program at the University of California at Irvine. Review of successive editions of the program's "Student Guide to Writing at UCI" reveals a progressive retreat from the program's…