In U. S. schools, which have a primarily White teaching force but an increasingly non-White student population, students and teachers may not be able to complete caring encounters based on their differing communication patterns. Therefore, it is important to understand what behaviors students view as caring so that teachers can complete caring…

Interviews with students at an all-Black, all-male school in a major northeastern city revealed that a significant proportion of the participating students had a strong preference for practical, demonstrative explanations of new concepts and information that are directly related to their everyday experiential realities. These findings suggest that…

This paper examines possible applications of confluent education to the foreign language classroom. The confluent approach creates an opportunity for integration of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and extrapersonal components in the process of learning. Confluent curriculum has been designed in three broad goal categories: to achieve traditional…

College teachers must take care not to treat students as a homogeneous, passive mass audience and equate lecturing with classroom control. Rather, they should judge teaching success by what students can do at course's end, reinforce desired intellectual behavior, test in ways that allow students to show abilities, and learn to interpret student…

Suggests six verbal techniques, other than direct questions, by which a teacher may promote classroom discussion: declarative statements, declarative re-statements, indirect questions, imperatives, student questions, and deliberate silence. (SJL)

The linear orientation toward the teaching of speech communication courses designed for prospective teachers is criticized in this study for its too simplistic speaker/message/receiver paradigm. In support of the position that a far broader and more complex pattern of communication must be embraced if any contemporary theorizing about…

Silent students are often actively involved in classroom learning despite appearances to the contrary, and teachers can use special instructional strategies to guide them to overt participation. Students with "communication apprehension" are often assumed to have low intelligence, but they may suffer instead from shyness, various…

One college history teacher finds lively and constructive classroom discussion in a survey course is primarily a result of the teacher's attitudes toward and assumptions about students. The teacher must create a safe atmosphere in which students can speak, and be direct and respectful with students, which clears the classroom of anxiety and…

Reports on a study of 138 college sociology professors on their attitudes about and techniques for learning students' names. Finds that the number of tactics used for learning names declines as class size increases. Includes 18 techniques for name-learning. (CFR)

Foreign language listening comprehension instruction too often relies on brief selections read aloud or sporadic teacher talk interspersed with native language (NL) utterances, which fail to provide sustained listening practice. NL is overused for grammar-related talk, reducing target language exposure, encouraging translation, and hindering…

This document contains abstracts of approximately 400 papers presented at the 1968 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. A sampling of the varied subjects covered includes: classroom interaction, verbal behavior, concept learning, conservation concepts, teaching the disadvantaged, teaching strategies, research on…

A model of classroom characteristics and interaction is used to examine the roles of group size, problem types, and student behaviors, central concerns in problem-based learning, in medical education. The model incorporates six classroom dimensions, including four process variables (classroom organization, learning task, teacher's instruction,…