Increased opportunities for undergraduate students in agricultural and natural resource disciplines to write for diverse audiences besides their instructor may increase motivation to write and improve student writing skills. The objectives of this teaching research were to determine and compare the initial writing experience of students enrolled…

This book provides teacher-tested tips on organizing, teaching journalism skills, layout, and publication for school newspaper advisors for grades 5-8. The book contains a variety of reproducibles and a handy glossary to help motivate real-life writing experiences. It also has computer clip art on a disc. The book notes that publishing a newspaper…

Intended especially for teachers who might be a little intimidated by the art of playwriting, this guide provides a step-by-step plan for using drama in the classroom in grades 4-8 to build children's language arts and thinking skills. The guide features a series of engaging activities where students will learn how to write dialogue, set scenes,…

This paper discusses the second year of a cooperative penpal project between preservice teacher education students and middle school students. Following a review of the literature to provide a context for this kind of research, the paper offers demographic data about the students on both sites (n=27 at each site) and describes visits to the middle…

For a teacher educator, a 2-year leave in Australia inspired her to replicate in Canada an Australian penpal project in which preservice elementary teachers wrote to school children who answered the letters and eventually met their penpals. Her preservice secondary teachers, English majors, wrote to eighth-grade students taught by one of her…

Television plays an important role in the lives of American children today. In addition to providing entertainment for children, television has an impact on children's learning both in school and outside of school. In November 1993, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting acquired data about children's viewpoints about television usage for…

Young adult literature (YAL) is an important and valuable tool for helping students learn and for motivating them to read. YAL also helps students gain insights into themselves and others. YAL (1) is written and marketed primarily for teenagers; (2) has main characters similar in age (12-25) to its readership; (3) has relatively uncomplicated plot…

Describing how the experiences of nine cognitive researchers have influenced college writing classrooms, this book demonstrates the critical role of the learner in interpreting and responding to the texts they read, the tasks they are assigned, and the feedback they receive from instructors, readers, and collaborators. Growing out of a project at…

This study analyzed girls' reactions to Disney's animated feature film "Pocahontas" in light of conclusions drawn from a previous critical textual analysis of the movie. The research addressed three questions: (1) how do Disney's claims to creation of positive prosocial representations of women and Native Americans in the movie…

The Advertising section of the proceedings contains the following 11 papers: "How to Systematically Design and Develop a Mastery-Based Advertising Skills Course" (Elaine L. Wagner and Andrea T. Smith); "Tolerance for Television Advertising" (W. James Potter and Walter Gantz); "Quenching the Thirst for Personal Information:…

This report is the culmination of a project that assessed the status of arts education in the public schools in Indiana. Detailed information on Indiana's total arts education program, including the areas of music, visual art, theater and dance education, was solicited by a comprehensive mail survey. An executive summary states that: arts literacy…

Given critical theory's current focus on the interaction between writers and readers over the surface of a text, it seems appropriate to examine the semantic component concerned with how writers anticipate that interaction--the interpersonal component. The relevance of the interpersonal component is apparent in traditional instruction on point of…

"Writing for the Computer Industry" is a two-quarter course that addresses the needs of English majors interested in careers as technical writers, graduate level students retraining for second careers as software technical writers, and computer science majors. Course work includes (1) analyzing audiences for computer documents and identifying…

First grade students (38) viewed a theater production on the theme of friendship in a study designed to determine the degree of the students' dramatic literacy. General objectives of the study were to: (1) compare children's learning from live theater with their learning from television; (2) describe what children knew about the play they saw and…

A writing program was developed and implemented, using available technology, to increase the quality and the quantity of written communication of three heterogeneously grouped classes of fifth graders. The students learned to use the word processor, Magic Slate II, for process writing assignments. A modem, Supra Modem 2400, and Proterm software…