Lecturer feedback on students' essays is important to the quality of the experience students have at university (Norton & Norton, 2001). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether early childhood students at one university actually read lecturer feedback on their essays and, if they did, what they found helpful and not helpful to…

The following is an historically-based analysis of a new phenomenon affecting rural schools and communities: animal confinement operations. A contrast is made between "enclosure" as it unfolded in England a few centuries ago and the way animal concentration units constitute a second, "modern" form of enclosure today. In both…

This paper reports the results of a study into the quality of peer feedback provided by students within a computerised peer-assessment environment. The study looks at the creation of a "feedback index" that represents the quality of an essay based upon the feedback provided during a peer-marking process and identifies a significant…

Who are the people who become positive educational leaders? This essay presents WICS as a model of positive educational leadership. WICS stands for "w"isdom, "i"ntelligence, "c"reativity, "s"ynthesized. Each of these elements is asserted to constitute one of the elements of educational leadership. Regrettably, our society is organized around a…

The author contends that the title of this collection, "Music and the Racial Imagination," is provocative. It simultaneously does several things. It brings together "music" and "race," which have not previously been given equal emphasis in musicology, and then links these two things with imagination. The title also creates an imagined space where…

This essay critically highlights the main features of a study that attaches importance to the concepts of time and optimism and their effects on the achievement and goals of high and low achievers in a North American and a Brazilian context. The focus on the time factor that serves as a leitmotif throughout the study gives this work its…

This handbook is intended to help high school and college counselors effectively use and interpret ACT results. It contains four main sections: Section 1, "Components of the ACT," which contains general information about the ACT tests, probably will be of interest both to high school counselors and to college advisors and other staff. …

This exploratory study, undertaken from a socio-cognitive perspective, aims to investigate the effects of intensive preparatory high school training in L1 and/or L2 essay writing for university entrance exams. The analysis focuses on the task response and structural features in L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English) essays written by first-year Japanese…

In this article we investigate the use of latent semantic analysis (LSA), critiquing systems, and knowledge building to support computer-based teaching of English composition. We have built and tested an English composition critiquing system that makes use of LSA to analyze student essays and compute feedback by comparing their essays with…

In 1918, just one year before the founding of American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Thorstein Veblin wrote, "In one shape or another, this problem of adjustment, reconciliation or compromise between the needs of higher learning and the demands of the business enterprise is forever present in the deliberations of the university…

Studies done in L1/L2 English settings have revealed the negative effects of writing anxiety on both learner motivation and academic achievement and teachers' attitudes towards writing and the practices they use in their own classes. The present study aims to find out the effects of peer feedback on the writing anxiety of Turkish prospective…

In an effort to assess student writing in a way that reflects current views of writing (i.e., as a social process supported by the interaction of a number of cognitive sub-processes), and yet still seeks to determine what students can do independently, it has become a common practice to include timed essays in student portfolios. However, this…

Expository hypertexts may contain specific types of signals such as navigable topical overviews and hyperlinks that map conceptual relationships between text contents. Two experiments with German university students (N = 130, 75% female, mean age 25 years) were conducted to test the hypothesis that hypertext-specific signals particularly support…

While peer review is a common practice in college composition courses, there is little consistency in approach and effectiveness within the field, owing in part to the dearth of empirical research that investigates peer-review processes. This study is designed to shed light on what a peer reviewer actually reads and attends to while providing…

Language arts teachers participated in an inservice program, The Writer's Clinic, and evaluated their students' improvement in writing ability using holistic essay scoring techniques. Seventh and eighth grade students were administered an essay composition pretest in December; the same essay topic was given as the post test in May. Students were…