Notes impact of high-stakes language arts assessments on teachers in Georgia rural districts. Provides additional support for what many English teachers already believe--that rich classroom discussion, reading from a variety of texts, student-centered writing assignments, and metacognitive awareness of one's reading and writing strategies…

Describes the author's experiences teaching composition to inmates at a women's minimum security prison. Describes how these students wrote with alacrity and passion, using writing as a tool to solve problems and enlighten. Discusses how mandated curriculum and assignment requirements were met, revisions made and issues of dialect discussed, while…

Describes an assignment in an undergraduate course on Roman history for junior and senior history majors in which students create their own 15-page textbook using primary sources. Explains how each class session developed student analysis of primary sources. (CMK)

Describes a library instruction program developed at Southwestern University (Texas) that is part of a required freshman symposium for all first-year students. Topics include library assignments; reading lists; problems; feedback from students and faculty; and possible future changes in the course. (LRW)

Reviews a study examining the influence of rhetorical specification in writing prompts on the writing quality of 7th-, 9th-, and 11th-grade students, and college freshmen. Analyzes the main and interactive effects of topic, purpose, and audience on writing quality. Indicates that students use different kinds of rhetorical information at different…

Two educators studied the effect of written teacher and peer comments on ninth graders' writing assignments, creating a peer response activity and analyzing student responses to a survey. Results showed that students considered both teacher and peer comments requesting additional information and correcting mechanics most helpful in the revision…

Discusses computer programs for textual research in literature and describes a graduate course on computing for the humanities that was developed at Dakota State University that used the World Wide Web and included students from throughout the world. Assignments for the course are described and benefits of textual analysis are discussed. (LRW)

Describes the objective behind this special issue: to identify a science content area (physics for eighth to eleventh graders), work with science teachers to produce a set of content materials, and present a common content outline to a group of instructional designers. The first article describes the derivation of the content outline. The next…

Introduces an adoption journal activity which is based on the observation of a subject and recording data of growth and behavior over a lengthy period of time. Integrates science, mathematics, and language arts. Includes eight assignments with rubrics. (YDS)

Presents an oral history project for high school students who are asked to select a non-related person to interview about a period or event in U.S. history, write a biography, and give a final public presentation on the interview. Includes a copy of the rubric in the appendix. (CMK)

This study follows three sixth grade primary school students as they access, interpret, and use information found on the Web for a class assignment. Discusses information seeking behavior, information interpretation skills, and information utilization, issues that educators must address to successfully integrate the Web into the classroom.…

The effect of teaching parents of 26 at-risk middle school students to facilitate a home-based self-management program to improve homework performances and academic achievement was investigated. Results indicated overall levels of homework completion and homework quality increased significantly for those students whose parents consistently…

First years students' experiences and knowledge about research paper writing were studied to investigate how strongly the process writing movement has influenced instructional practice, and how appropriately students have been prepared for their college experience. Finds that many of the students arrived at college without the experience of…

Describes a project for a history survey course where students visit a historic site and write an essay that identifies a broad theme in history relating the site to the theme; the students must also reflect upon their own learning process. Discusses the merits of the project providing student responses. Gives an appendix. (CMK)

Describes the experience of one developmental reading class instructor in using articles from current event publications to foster problem solving, synthesis and analysis, and perspective-taking. Discusses the assignments given to the students and the process used for evaluating student work. Includes a six-step demonstration of study strategies.…