Business professionals and instructors often view writing skills as one of the most important qualifications that employees should possess. However, many business employees, including recent college graduates, have serious writing deficiencies, especially in their ability to use standard English. As a result, American businesses spend billions of…

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Mina Shaughnessy's groundbreaking book, "Errors and Expectations," a roundtable discussion was held at the March 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York City. This article, based on the earlier discussion, examines the question of CUNY's multiple…

In this study the authors investigated the use of 5 (i.e., Claudy, Ezekiel, Olkin-Pratt, Pratt, and Smith) R[squared] correction formulas with the Pearson r[squared]. The authors estimated adjustment bias and precision under 6 x 3 x 6 conditions (i.e., population [rho] values of 0.0, 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9; population shapes normal, skewness…

The purposes of this study were to explore the effects and the validity of on-line peer assessment in high schools and to analyze effects of various types of peer feedback on students. The participating students, a total of 184 10th graders, developed their individual course projects by involving the on-line peer assessment learning activities in…

Previous work in the literature reveals that EFL learners were deficient in collocations that are a hallmark of near native fluency in learner's writing. Among different types of collocations, the verb-noun (V-N) one was found to be particularly difficult to master, and learners' first language was also found to heavily influence their collocation…

The study investigates the effect of explicit contrastive analysis and translation activities on the incidental acquisition of single words and collocations. We compared three high school groups of learners of the same L1 and comparable L2 (English) proficiency. Each group represented one instructional condition: meaning focused instruction (MFI),…

The present study examined how the magnitude of time-out duration following incorrect responses affected the ability of adults to learn simple visual discriminations. Sixty-four college students were randomly assigned to one of four groups that received a 0-, 5-, 10-, or 20-s time-out duration after an incorrect response. Each participant…

In order to improve the spelling performance of high school students with deficits in written expression, an error self-correction procedure was implemented. The participants were two tenth-grade students and one twelfth-grade student in a program for individuals with learning disabilities. Using an alternating treatments design, the effect of…

Among the varied analytical challenges institutional researchers face, examining faculty pay may be one of the most vexing. Although the literature on faculty compensation analysis dates back to the 1970s (Loeb and Ferber, 1971; Gordon, Morton, and Braden, 1974; Scott, 1977; Braskamp and Johnson, 1978; McLaughlin, Smart, and Montgomery, 1978),…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether proofreading a text aloud was more effective than silent proofreading in helping Black English Vernacular (BEV) speaking students to locate and correct dialect features in writing. The study was divided into two parts. In the first part, 29 11th grade BEV-speakers edited three teacher-produced…

As one of several approaches to SLA as social practice, Conversation Analysis (CA) has the capacity to examine in detail how opportunities for L2 learning arise in different interactional activities. Its particular strength, and one that distinguishes it from other social practice approaches, is its consistent focus on the orientations and…

This paper and the invitational meeting for which it has been prepared make certain assumptions about the challenge of strengthening the quality of medication management in school. The participants believe that recent research on improving the safety and quality of patient care has relevance for health services in school, particularly the safety…

An aspect of the complex relationship between students homework and academic achievement (Cooper, Robinson, and Patall, 2006) was examined by correlating TIMSS 2003 mathematics results with the data about homework in 46 countries of the TIMSS study. The TIMSS results had no statistically significant correlation with the teachers' emphasis on…

Analyzes data from two empirical studies of spelling errors made in online catalog searches. One study used transaction logs to categorize errors, while another gauged student responses to an experimental catalog that detected errors. Recommendations for improving online catalogs to assist users in spelling are discussed. Contains 10 tables and 3…

Argues that grammatical errors in English-as-a-Second-Language learning are interpretive conflicts that involve meaning as well as form. Noun number errors, or the incorrect use of the plural "-s," are used to illustrate that errors result from two different noun number conceptions: the optional, free-floating -s and the ever present, two-member…