Research has demonstrated differences in the ways in which males and females communicate both in speech and in writing. A study extended previous research on gender differences in written communication to adults. Follow-up questionnaires were mailed to 277 people who had completed teacher preparation programs at the University of Tennessee. There…

There are many learning opportunities in the science curriculum which emphasize creativity. Learning opportunities are described in this paper which involve: (1) problem solving experiences; (2) poetry reading and writing; (3) prose and its applications in creative endeavors; (4) art work as creativity in science; (5) creative dramatics and famous…

Contextualizing reality is the final goal of academic pursuit, and in college level language studies, a key goal should always be to make students aware of what they already know. The words used by humans are either organizational, functional words, or they are related to cultural literacy. Cultural literacy is a body of knowledge that all people…

The objectives of this study were to determine whether student writing portfolios could be rated reliably by trained judges; study the effects on student ratings of the differential leniency of the judges; and ascertain the effects of writing-prompt difficulty and its interactions with rater leniency. Writing samples from 127 students in grades 3,…

The concept of genre should not be limited to literary genres, but should be expanded to include all types of texts, including those traditionally considered to be nonliterary. Essentially, many things about writing work the way they do because of genre, and a better understanding of genre can give us a better understanding of writing, reading and…

College students, when writing essays in writing courses, are generally called upon to show that they have an ability to organize the essay according to an established pattern which includes an introduction, the body of the text, and a conclusion. This pattern of discourse, called "Essayist Literacy," is most favored by mainstream…

The polarity of gender is perhaps the most important shaping force in the nineties in the growth and change of education and educational theory. Many critics have argued that there is a masculine bias at the heart of most academic disciplines and methodologies. Feminist approaches, conversely, are viewed as intuitive, expressive, and unscientific.…

A number of teachers have for some years been creating lesbian and gay-inclusive college-level composition courses. Teachers who create such courses do so because it is intrinsic to their notion of good teaching, which includes the goal of fostering students' personal relationships with the written word. Many of these teachers often speak of…

"Farewll to Manzanar" (Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston), autobiographical account of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, might be used in a writing class to help students think deliberately about race and ethnicity. Writing about the book and researching the history surrounding it could serve to…

To ask students to write and respond to each other's papers is one means of confronting the difficulties posed by radical texts such as Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision," an essay from her collection "On Lies, Secrets, and Silence." When an instructor assigns such a work, he or she places him- or…

Writing teachers are constantly confronted with the problem of forming effective responding strategies to help student writing improve. Even though the way writing is taught has shifted from a product- to a process-oriented approach, teachers' responding practices seem particularly resistant to modification. "Practitioner lore" suggests…

A storyteller, folklorist, music advisor and language arts teacher uses storytelling in his classroom to inspire students to talk, write, perform, listen, and learn. Beginning with a seventh-grade elective class, the teacher (an employee of the Foxfire project and not trained as an English teacher) decided to spend two weeks with the students…

A general model of academic self-regulation is proposed that emphasizes the roles of goals, self-efficacy, and learning strategies. Within this framework, the contributions of two variables hypothesized to affect self-regulation are highlighted. One variable is strategy value information, or information about the usefulness of a strategy as an aid…

When the ideology of individualism is used in composition studies to create a hero image for the writer/teacher, the effect is to exclude from the "hero status" people who do not fit the requirements of the ideology. However beautiful and powerful a story it may be, for instance, Mike Rose's "Lives on the Boundary" puts forth…

A study diagnosed the nature of different text production abilities of Swiss grade 5 and grade 9 students, and of adults, and diagnosed good and poor writers' differences within each of these three age groups. Subjects, 36 in all, were uniformly divided between 11- and 15-year-old students from the Bernese secondary school and high school…