A study examined whether the higher-order thinking patterns elicited by a reader response approach would carry over and become part of students' ways of thinking about literature, even in the absence of reader response prompts. Subjects were fourth-grade students (48 in all) in two intact, heterogeneously grouped classrooms in the same elementary…

Written in the same spirit as the earlier edition but thoroughly revised and updated, this book is designed to make teachers aware of reader-response theory and its implications for literature instruction and curriculum. The book demonstrates how a response-centered curriculum brings students to a greater understanding of all forms of literature…

Kenneth Burke's concepts of identification, the five terms of dramatism, and strategic uses of ambiguity can be successfully taught to undergraduates if appropriate and familiar examples are used. Print and electronic advertising offer the instructor an up-to-date, familiar, and abundant source of classroom examples. Market segmentation models…

As personality and social psychology research has shown, cross-situational consistency of people's social behavior tends to be rather low. This applies also to teachers' classroom behavior: teachers adapt to situative conditions. However, both situation specificity and teachers' adaptation are not sufficiently taken into account in research and in…

A series of six papers and an introduction which present the results and tentative analyses of studies investigating such constructs as self-esteem, perceptions of control, and competence are included in this document. These papers are: (1) "Multiple Dimensions of Locus of Control and Their Relationship To Standardized Achievement Scores in Fifth…

A study examined student responses to teacher-initiated questions in classrooms of English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The study focused specifically on the similarities and differences in the questions asked by native-speaking (NS) teachers of ESL and by non-native-speaking (NNS) teachers of EFL, and to…

This guide has been developed to help educators and parents, particularly those in rural areas, locate information for better understanding the potential effects of divorce on children. The guide includes materials that consider different developmental stages of children and different stages of the divorce process. It offers materials that can be…

Experienced elementary teachers (N=98) described their general strategies for coping with perfectionist students told how they would handle incidents depicted in two vignettes portraying problems of perfectionism at school. Most of the teachers were oriented toward sympathetic responses featuring support, encouragement, assistance, and attempts at…

This booklet was designed to help school personnel make good use of their opportunities for helping bereaved children directly as well as helping others in the classroom who may have concerns about death upon hearing of another child's loss. It provides necessary information for teachers on how children view death and the nature of bereavement…

Viewing language as both presentational and representational, or as having both manifest and latent content, can help writing instructors and student writers appreciate its full function and better understand the nature of writing errors. This essential duality of language usage is seen by its functions consisting of unconscious (primary process)…

Although schools in many countries have initiated mass media education, American schools still give little consideration to any systematic study of the mass media. Students are particularly in need of learning how to apply basic critical viewing concepts to watching television, the most powerful and ubiquitous of the mass media. Most researchers…

The goal of this study was to assess the relative merit of various ranges and types of response scales in terms of respondent satisfaction and comfort and the nature of the elicited information in a population of seventh grade students. Three versions of an attitudinal questionnaire, each containing the same items but employing a different…

This document presents a practicum designed to address the problems encountered when a child in nondirective play therapy becomes able to express emotions and parents, unable to accept their child's new expressions of anger, withdraw the child from therapy at a time when he or she is most vulnerable. The development and implementation of a program…

In the interest of applying reader response theory to journalism this paper posits that readers of newspapers, like readers of literature, take an active role in making meaning from the articles they read, rather than passively accepting news as a finished, static product. Additionally, it proposes that journalism textbooks pay little attention to…

Intended for literature instructors, this digest explains the relationship of transactional theory (a reciprocal, mutually defining relationship between the reader and the literary text) to the teaching of literature. The importance of the reader's part in literature is first demonstrated, noting that attention must be paid to who the readers are,…