In this article, the author shares how she envisioned and created a writing assignment for a ninth-grade English course. The writing project is a class novel comprised of short stories, one written by each student. In the writing assignment, seniors compile their favorite writings from any class in any year of high school and write reflections…

It is costly for faculty to deal with cheating. Keith-Spiegel et al. (1998) identified several of these costs and argued that they can be grouped into four categories: emotionality, difficult, fear, and denial. I argue that the emotional and fear costs for faculty make it unlikely that the common approaches to dealing with plagiarism will be…

Game-based assignments typically form an integral component of computer programming courses. The effectiveness of the assignments in motivating students to carry out repetitive programming tasks is somewhat limited since their outcomes are invariably limited to a simple win or loss scenario. Accordingly, this paper develops a simulation…

There are many websites today that offer free machine translations and although beginning students of German are not always proficient enough to judge the quality of these translations or to fully understand certain translation results, they use these services nonetheless for their assignments. The problem for the educator is to distinguish…

If reading teachers are letting struggling readers do minimal writing in reading classes, then this practice falls under iatrogenic teaching practices, i.e., practices based on good intentions that produce unintended negative consequences. The problem arises when reading teachers believe their students' writing should take place under the purview…

The purpose of this study was to use multiple data sources, both objective and subjective, to capture students' thinking processes as they were engaged in problem solving, examine the cognitive tool use patterns, and understand what tools were used and why they were used. The findings of this study confirmed previous research and provided clear…

The current studies evaluated a capstone course, Professional Issues in Psychology, designed to prepare students for a career in psychology. The first study examined course topics and student evaluations of assignments across 4 terms. Overall, students reported that the assignments were very helpful. The second study found that students who had…

Spiritual nurturing includes the recognition that children have valuable ways of knowing, such as pondering, sacred listening, intuition, and dreams and visions. Children nurtured in spiritual ways of being are supported through the traits of creativity, compassion, love, gratitude, affirmation, contemplation, and silence. These attributes are…

In what ways do students understand and document literacies within out-of-school communities in their school-sponsored writings? How can community literacy sites and public perceptions of community disrepair stimulate students to create written responses on the politics of place? These questions are at the heart of this article's investigation…

This article reports a set of two homework assignments that can be used in a second-year undergraduate organic chemistry class. These assignments were designed to help reinforce concepts of molecular geometry and to give students the opportunity to use a technological database and data mining to analyze experimentally determined chemical…

Research on teachers' beliefs has demonstrated that beliefs have an important impact on teachers' practice. In teacher feedback research, however, not much is known about teachers' beliefs and the extent to which they influence practice. This article reports on the findings from a study that investigated teachers' beliefs and practice in written…

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve the project goals and objectives while adhering to project constraints--usually scope, quality, time and budget. The secondary challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of resources necessary to meet pre-defined objectives. Project management software provides an active…

Have you ever wondered what character traits you need in order to be an effective teacher? This article discusses the findings from a 15-year research study of what in-service and preservice teachers have determined are the 12 characteristics of an effective teacher. Over his collegiate teaching career, the researcher has engaged college students…

The bilingual poetry and stories of Salvadoran writer Jorge Argueta have been an invaluable resource in this author's classroom. She has used poems from "Talking with Mother Earth" for homework and class analysis during a study of ecosystems, the story "Xochitl and the Flowers" to lead into persuasive writing, and "Bean Soup" to teach…

Faculty and librarians agree on the qualities of a good research question. However, in an exploratory study, they differed on when students should develop their research question. While librarians stated that students should develop their question early, first-year writing faculty advocated for delaying the development of the research question.…