Introduces seven essays on Ronald Takaki's "Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans." Opinion is divided as to the book's merits in terms of its content, organization, and research methodology. Two responses by Mr. Takaki are included. (DM)

Claims many student writers long for instruction in using writing to assess, define, and assert who they are becoming. Suggests these students would find Black feminist essayists useful for their ability to reconcile social and personal identities and for directing those identities toward rhetorically useful ends. (NH)

Argues the heart of the critical essay is an engagement with ideas, with a contemplative realm of thought that is active. Cautions contemporary cultural critics to be vigilant about writing in an ethnographic self-serving manner. (NH)

Aspects of personalization in historical descriptions and explanations are explored, considering conceptualizations of great leaders, the personification of institutions, and the tendency of students to transform structural explanations into personalization. It is argued that personalization is central to a common-sense concept of history. (SLD)

Explores the use of directives through an analysis of a 2.5 million word corpus of published articles, textbooks, and second language student essays, and through interviews with insider informants on their perceptions and practices. (Author/VWL)

Assessing students' information literacy skills can be difficult depending on the involvement of the librarian in a course. To overcome this, librarians created an assignment called the Paper Trail, where students wrote a short essay about their research process and reflected on what they would do differently. Through reviewing and grading these…

In an investigation of the assessment and construct validity of stress-related growth, community-dwelling women (N = 163) wrote essays about the impact of a stressful life event that had occurred in the previous few years and completed the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI). Independent ratings of growth in the essays were positively correlated…

Several months after having completed an introductory economics course, most students are no better able to answer simple economic questions than students who never took the course. The problem seems to be that principles courses try to teach students far too much, with the result that everything goes by in a blur. The good news is that a…

Nine unique meaning constructs were derived from a content analysis of free essays written by 85 mourners in response to the question, "What does the death of your loved one mean to you?" These constructs were then treated as predictor variables in a quantitative analysis of several indices of bereavement adjustment including (a) risk factors of…

The assessment of writing ability is notoriously difficult. Different facets of the assessment seem to influence its outcome. Besides the writer's writing proficiency, the topic of the assignment, the features or traits scored (e.g., content or language use) and even the way in which these traits are scored (e.g., holistically or analytically)…

This essay describes the mechanisms and resources necessary to ensure effective engagement in higher education. Entering a second decade of service, our goal is to move beyond defining goals and strategies, and focus upon solidifying the institutional structures and resources needed to sustain our commitment to serving the needs of Baltimore. The…

The book, "Musical Identities" (Raymond MacDonald, David Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell, eds.; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) consists of 11 essays on the psychology of music. The editors divided the essays into two groups: those on developing musical identities ("identities in music" involving recognizable…

In this article, the author discusses the five-paragraph essay, a way of organizing ideas into an introduction with a main argument, three body paragraphs that develop that argument, and a conclusion that advances the argument a step further by way of application or tantalizing suggestion. She stresses the importance of teaching the five-paragraph…

This paper presents the annual report of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for 2008. 2008 was a year of profound accomplishments for FIRE. While some colleges continued to show an appalling disregard for the fundamental rights of students and faculty members, FIRE was able to secure groundbreaking victories for civil…

This article explores the particular challenges and possibilities of service learning pedagogy for basic writers. Because a number of scholars of service learning and basic writing (Adler-Kassner, Arca, and Kraemer) are concerned primarily with developing underprepared students' academic literacies, I investigated how the students in a service…