The essay test has great potential to assess the higher levels of student understanding of economics. The problem is that most instructors fail to exploit the significant advantage of this testing method and to avoid its pitfalls. The author highlights the advantages and pitfalls to essay testing in economics and gives instructors many practical…

Through a project called "By Teens, for Teachers," 464 short essays were written by teenagers about issues specific to the experience of today's adolescents. In this descriptive study, participants chose from thirteen different writing prompts derived from an extensive literature review to reflect issues in adolescent development. Essays were…

Richard Shusterman's idea in his latest book, "Performing Live"--to make available a set of essays that sum up and tie together some of his central concerns during the last decade--is excellent and welcome. Readers of the book get a complex blend of essays from one of the most interesting and interdisciplinary philosophers writing in the United…

This article presents a collection of work that grew out of an international symposium sponsored by the History of Education Society UK and held in Hamburg in 2007. The symposium aimed to contribute to understandings of different approaches to researching the extent to which education has contributed historically to social change in respect of…

Current research indicates that students often have a difficult time getting started on reaching their course goals. This study examines the impact of an intervention exercise on the final grades and success rates of two groups of community college students in California. At the beginning of the spring semester 2007, students in two English…

Instructors of elementary science methods classes have long lamented the significant difficulties their students exhibit when trying to understand the many complexities of teaching science. As noted by some researchers and practicing teachers, preservice teachers often fail to developmentally function at desired levels with respect to…

Genre-based approaches to teaching writing have made important strides in heightening students' awareness of audience and purpose but have paid less attention to the ways in which expectations for written performance in school context are embedded in expectations for certain kinds of discipline-based thinking. In this paper we present a study that…

This study was an expanded replication of an earlier endeavor (Shermis, Burstein, & Bliss, 2004) to document the writing outcomes associated with automated essay scoring. The focus of the current study was on determining whether exposure to multiple writing prompts facilitated writing production variables (Essay Score, Essay Length, and Number…

This study explored the effects of achievement goals on English as a foreign language (EFL) college students' reading strategy use and reading comprehension from the perspective of multiple goals. Fifty-seven participants verbalised their thoughts while reading an English expository essay. They also completed assessments on their reading goal…

The preceding two essays focus on the ongoing challenge to engage students in meaningful conversation with the course content, their reading, their instructor, and one another. The authors, Maureen Neal and Ed Jones, have read each other's essays and provided the following brief responses. This cross talk between the writers is an attempt to make…

This article discusses exchanges between a number of scholars during the 1990s centering on Min-Zhan Lu's controversial essay "Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?" In some ways, "Conflict and Struggle" blazed a trail for later work in "hybrid" or "mixed" forms of academic writing while at the same time igniting…

We built an NLP system implementing a "virtual writing conference" for elementary-school children, with German as the target language. Currently, state-of-the-art computer support for writing tasks is restricted to multiple-choice questions or quizzes because automatic parsing of the often ambiguous and fragmentary texts produced by pupils…

This essay describes how we facilitated the design of a campus leadership team. What is particularly interesting about this consultative project is that both authors participated--one as facilitator and the other as participant. The facilitation included a needs assessment prior to the event, the use of structured controversy techniques,…

Student plagiarism is a pervasive and increasing problem at all levels of study in tertiary institutions. This study attempted explicitly and implicitly to address issues of plagiarism within the broad context of an academic writing framework in tutorials in a first-year module at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Despite these…

The study examines whether writers from shared cultural backgrounds display common writing patterns in their texts and whether these patterns differ while writing in L1 versus L2. The study explored the presence and bidirectional transfer of rhetorical patterns in eighteen Turkish participants' writing in relation to previous writing instructional…