The relevance effect refers to the facilitative effect of relevance instructions on learning. The authors examined the effect of general prereading relevance instructions on fact and concept learning, essay quality, and reading time. College students either did or did not receive relevance instructions before reading an expository text.…

A comparison between composition and literature is presented in Harriet Malinowitz's "Business, Pleasure, and the Personal Essay". The importance of praising and analyzing various interpretations of a text to English studies is emphasized.

Students' out-of-school literacy practices can complement in-school speaking and writing, if the teacher knows how to instill them. A professor analyzes how one student writes an essay and a rap on the same subject and recommends bringing hip-hop culture into the classroom to help students become academically successful.

In this article, the winning essays of the Cliff Weiss Memorial Essay Contest are presented. In the two winning essays, the authors describe how to explain the value of career and technical education (CTE) to a new student. Shi Meicheng, Secondary Winner, states that CTE has provided her with a toolbox for success while Ginnie Bushong,…

The ready availability of Internet resources has made it easier than ever for students to plagiarize and many higher education institutions have resorted to checking essays with plagiarism detection software. Student behaviour is likely to change in response to this increased scrutiny but not necessarily in the desired direction. Internet…

In his recent book, "The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault," Alexander Nehamas presents two conceptions of philosophy--philosophy as a theorethical discipline concerned to offer arguments; and the interest of Socrates, Montaigne, and also Nietzsche and Foucault in the art of living. Building on his "Nietzsche: Life as…

2001 marked Yale's 300th birthday. It seemed an opportunity for reflection on the evolution of the institution, and particularly on the vicissitudes of the humanities over those three centuries. This article presents essays which represent a selection from the symposium, "Beginning With the Humanities," held at the Whitney Humanities Center on…

The College Board's Advanced Placement European History examination has evolved over the course of its first half-century of existence in virtually all respects: the types and subject matter of questions asked (and not asked); the nature of the history those questions reflect; the number of questions both offered and to be answered, as well as how…

The variety of factors contributing to the quality of handwriting or print provides an opportunity to determine the extent to which teachers are influenced by the interaction between different bias elements during evaluation of examinations. Fifty-three teachers evaluated compositions that had been awarded grades of 80% by impartial experts. A…

This guide was developed to help teachers prepare adult students for the essay writing section of the General Educational Development (GED) tests. It informs teachers of what is expected of students on the essay section of the GED examination, and leads them through the writing process in preparation for teaching students how to write an essay.…

This study investigated the validity of various approaches to the measurement of English composition skills. Over 600 11th and 12th-grade students were asked to write five 20-minute essays on different topics, to take six objective tests of writing ability, and to do two interlinear exercises. Twenty-five experienced readers assigned scores of…

This study was conducted to gather evidence regarding effects of the mode of writing (handwritten vs. word-processed) on compositional quality in a sample of sixth grade students. Questionnaire data and essay scores were gathered to examine the effect of composition mode on essay scores of students of differing computer skill levels. The study was…

There are not many English words for "anger." There's "wrath" and "ire," although no one uses "ire" anymore and hardly anyone "wrath." There's "frustration," "resentment," and "indignation," but they don't have the emotional intensity of "anger," a word that…

This paper reports on degrees of awareness and use of specific metacognitive strategies by 16 students in a final-year high school biology class in New Zealand. The aims of the intervention were to broaden students' thinking about bioethical issues associated with cancer and to enhance students' use of metacognition. Cues and prompts were used in…

This essay offers an analysis of PowerPoint apart from the histrionics of the "'Tis and 'Taint" arguments about its value, and proposes a program of research to move forward our understanding of PowerPoint as an inscriptional system. To that end, the study begins with a discussion of PowerPoint as an inscriptional system that employs both…