This cross-case analysis of three distinct letter writing activities between prospective teachers (PTs) and K-12 learners provides insights into PTs' levels of feedback according to Hattie and Timperley's (2007) framework. PTs' written feedback from letter writing activities conducted in teacher preparation programs were analyzed using this…

This paper reports on a study examining the effects of visualizing online writing activities on student behaviors and learning outcomes. A design-based research approach was adopted to develop and integrate theory and practice in natural educational settings (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012). The study was conducted in an 18-week, semester-long…

A study examined topic selection and spelling development in kindergarten students' journal writing. Subjects, 19 kindergarten students enrolled in a middle-class school, were informally interviewed about their writing. The students' writing topics were categorized and their spelling analyzed. Results indicated that the children were able to…

Designed as a supplement to traditional writing texts, this workbook contains activities that allow students to form grammatically sophisticated sentences without having to study formal grammar. The 68 lessons in the workbook progress from relatively simple to complex, with each stressing a particular way of combining sentences. The various…

It may be suggested that one's reflection on psychology's past and present state is an important part of finding one's identity within psychology. The facilitation of each individual student's quest for identity within psychology may be taken as a fundamental goal of the theories and history of a psychology course. This quest may be stifled if…

Study in writing processes, as presented in this paper, is based on the assumption that in order to write effectively, writers must be able not only to present ideas and feelings, but also to engage in the cognitive processes that will help them discover what they wish to say about a given idea, attitude, or set of data. These basic cognitive…

Once students can identify main (independent) clauses and main ideas, a simple graphic system will demonstrate whether their sentences are strong and unified. The student underlines the main clause of a sentence and circles the main idea. In a strong, unified sentence, the circle will sit on the line. If the circle does not sit on the line, the…

Students do not need to be told that they are socially constituted so much as they need to experience, in concrete terms, what that means. In an era of identity politics, they need to experience the labels they choose (or the labels chosen for them) as no less problematic than they are inevitable. A means to this end is a classroom heuristic tried…

Writing instructors who would like to move beyond the collaboration provided by workshops and peer-response groups might consider asking groups of students to write a collage together. According to Peter Elbow, a collage "consists not of a single perfectly connected train of explicit thinking or narrative but rather of fragments: arranged how…

It is possible to reconcile two supposedly warring viewpoints toward composition pedagogy: that writers know what they want to say before they begin writing (a viewpoint that stresses the communicative function of writing), and that writers discover what they have to say in the act of saying it (a viewpoint that focuses on the heuristic value of…

Describes two strategies to help students start writing poetry. The first involves underlining key subject words in poems or replacing them with other subject words. In the second, students record interesting facts about an animal and rearrange them in order of interest. (BC)

Many teachers would like to counter what Deborah Tannen calls "The Argument Culture." They recognize that teaching students traditional principles of argument may perpetuate the kind of adversarial thinking that erupts all too often: in aggressive newspaper headlines, on confrontational television shows, in court rooms, and in school…

Most freshmen who have been introduced to the scientific report are unaware of its rhetorical complexities and problem-solving purpose. Instead, they experience the task of writing lab reports as a perfunctory recording of prescribed activities. In 1994 an instructor, faced with the taks of developing a writing across the curriculum (WAC) sequence…

Teachers teach literature to help students expand and develop their image-making powers, "to imagine, conceive, fancy, picture," to think. To get students involved in literature, especially poetry, Robert Frost's poem, "The Witch of Coos," is particularly useful because it is so immediately accessible. In order to help engage…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the influences of two individual variables--verbal aptitude and writing apprehension--on the production of persuasive arguments by college students. Subjects were 47 college students who wrote preliminary and final drafts of persuasive letters. Results of both experiments revealed that the students' verbal…