Active learning and online education have become important aspects of knowledge delivery. Nevertheless, little research exists on how active learning techniques can be implemented in an online environment. Deliberate equivalence of methods and materials for onsite and online delivery mechanisms is often seen as a strong point in favor of a…

Writing-to-learn involves the use of low-stakes informal writing activities intended to help students reflect on concepts or ideas presented in a course. Writing-to-learn can be a flexible and effective tool to help students understand and engage with course concepts, and past research has shown that writing-to-learn activities can substantially…

Reflective writing is an efficient way of getting feedback from students. Paper-based or web-based course evaluation questionnaires alone may lack of collecting specific and detailed information, especially for the fields like design education. This study focuses on reflections captured from students via two different media--personal magazine and…

This paper is a self-study that uses the lens of Vygotsky's four phases of sign acquisition to examine one student writer's development of voice through writing produced from 5th grade through her second year of graduate school (17 years). Growing up as a twin--and as a visually impaired individual--the author learned how to use the written word…

This article isolates and observes the impact of peer readership on low-stakes reflective writing assignments in two large Introduction to Sociology classes. Through a comparative content analysis of over 2,000 private reflective journal entries and semipublic reflective blog posts, I find that both practices produce distinct forms of reflection.…

This study presents how college freshmen students reflect on their writing skills using a triangular writing process. A triangular writing process consists of Clog as a freewriting format, personal journal log as an informal writing format, and writing assignments as a formal writing format. Participants were 47 undergraduate students who took…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students' text-based writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students' mastery of analytic text-based writing. Text-based writing tasks…

This pilot study aims at integrating a socio-pragmatic concept, Cooperative Principles, into an experimental writing project on the genres of comparison and contrast. It reports on a six-week study of five undergraduates voluntarily recruited in a university located in central Taiwan. In surveying their writing momentum before and after the…

This study investigated the lived experiences of first-year college students who kept personal and private journals in an English composition course. The purpose of this study was to provide a description of the lived experiences of keeping those journals from the point-of-view of the journal writers themselves. Forty-eight students were involved…

Teachers of standards based, College Prep English classes regularly face resistant and struggling readers who fail to engage, persevere, and comprehend curricular texts. As a result, these readers do not share in class discussions. Therefore, a class discourse was formulated upon Gee's (1996) Social Discourse theory and Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, and…

The environment is a ready-made subject in writing classrooms, and teachers at all levels are encouraging students to write about nature and environmental issues. Environmental issues provide a equitable meeting place for students from a variety of different backgrounds, interests, and ideologies. There are also many pedagogical advantages to…

This lesson introduces Family Message Journals, a tool for encouraging family involvement and supporting writing to reflect and learn. First and second graders are led into composing through demonstration, guided writing, and finally independent writing of messages that they will bring home for family to read and write a reply. During the three…

Although drama has been used successfully in English as a second language and has been shown to have positive effects on achievement and on self-confidence and motivation in various studies, it has received little attention in French immersion context where subjects are taught in French, the second language of students. The objective of this study…

This booklet provides practical exploration of the use of narrative in the classroom with students and in teachers' personal and professional development. The various narrative forms are described in boxes throughout the booklet and include letter writing, storytelling, autobiographical accounts and several others. There are four "Your…