Psychologists and educators throughout the world paid attention to creativity and creative thinking. The routine type of tasks in the school appears to be very simple and uninteresting to the creative students. Atmosphere of some schools is conducive for the development of creative potential. Whereas the atmosphere of many schools comes in the way…

Translingual Literature is literature written in a language not native to the author, in two languages, or in a mix of languages. This bibliography is the very first attempt to create and publish such an academic tool for researchers of multilingualism, second-language acquisition, comparative literature, and other fields. It contains only books…

The author, a former middle school teacher and now an associate professor at The University of Minnesota, was asked to write an essay for the inaugural issue of this journal that: (1) advanced the call for a more diverse dialogue in the field of middle grades education; and (2) addressed the question, "Why do we need more provocative debate…

In pursuit of more mindful notions of hybridity, this review essay provides a series of reflections on Mathew Weinstein's representations of Street Medics and "sciences for the red zones of neoliberalism". My analysis draws on three popular ways of thinking with boundaries to offer a critical reading of the boundary-work that the…

There is a large body of research on the effectiveness of rater training methods in the industrial and organizational psychology literature. Less has been reported in the measurement literature on large-scale writing assessments. This study compared the effectiveness of two widely used rater training methods--self-paced and collaborative…

This essay is a reply to Brian Dotts's "Beyond the Schoolhouse Door," which focuses on the need of a system of general education in Jefferson's writings on educative reform. [For Dotts' "Beyond the Schoolhouse Door: Educating the Political Animal in Jefferson's Little Republics," see EJ1061579.]

Typically developing writers in fifth (n = 110, M = 10 years 8 months) or seventh (n = 97, M = 12 years 7 months) grade wrote informative, compare and contrast, and persuasive essays for which the content was held constant--two mountains with a history of volcanic eruption. Relevant background knowledge was provided by reading text and showing…

Struck by the dullness of some of her students' essay introductions, Paula Worth reflected on the fact that she had never focused specifically on introductions. After surveying existing work by history teachers on essay structure in general and introductions in particular, she turns to the work of historians. Drawing on scholarly writing by…

To be efficient and satisfied in his/her profession, a teacher needs to realize adequately his/her strengths and weaknesses. To support development of self-reflective skills by future teachers, students at Department of Economic Teaching Methodology at University of Economics in Prague were asked to write an essay called 'Why am I supposed to be a…

Peer learning is often used in classrooms to help and support knowledge and skill acquisition. One form of peer learning, peer assessment, involves the quantitative (i.e., peer ratings) or qualitative (i.e., peer feedback) evaluation of a learner's performance by another learner among students. While we might be concerned about the quality of the…

The dissertation paints a cultural-historical portrait of the New Criticism, a formalist school of twentieth-century literary criticism. My case study revisits the trajectory of this vital school of thought through a fine-grained textual comparison of critical essays produced by principal affiliates. Using "genre" as a guiding concept, I…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a difference in the writing assessment scores for each of the four traits--development, focus and organization, language, and conventions--as measured by the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) of students who had a formal keyboarding course compared to those who did not. A…

This article demonstrates a step-by-step teaching method using a poem, a play, and a short essay to help students support each other and take responsibility for learning.

Argumentation is challenging for young learners. We used design research to develop an intervention that was based on principles of dialogic argumentation and strategy instruction and used genre elements to guide planning and evaluation for revision. Instruction included oral discussion of children's books, written responses to reading, and the…

In this study, I present a qualitative analysis of 11 writing portfolios drawn from a yearlong instructional program designed to apprentice students into the practices of argumentative writing typical of early-college coursework in the United States. The students' formal and informal writings were parsed into utterances and coded along two…