Experiential education provides an excellent justificatory framework for the forensics program as an educational opportunity. The three major tenets of experiential education are: (1) connecting theoretical knowledge to real life experiences; (2) valuing and fostering different "ways of knowing"; and (3) encouraging lifelong learning.…

A study examined whether published texts and studies being used in the speech communication classroom adequately address the needs of students when they go into the laboratory setting of forensic tournaments. Published studies in speech communication, selected textbooks used in the basic speech course, and selected studies and textbooks in…

Noting that the study of composition has been less affected by postmodern theory than other humanities and social science disciplines, this book assesses the study and teaching of writing against the larger theoretical, political, and technological upheavals of the past 30 years. The book addresses the theoretical debate about the "self"…

Writers construct meaning when they compose texts, and readers construct meaning when they understand and interpret texts. Building meaning through reading entails organizing, selecting, and connecting. Readers use previously acquired knowledge to operate on textual clues, organizing mental representations that include material they select from…

During the past several decades, a new class of measurement theory, called latent trait (or item response) theory, has become popular. Supporters contend that results obtained through the use of this theory prove vastly superior to classical measurement statistics. This paper investigates the use of the Rasch model, one of the more popular latent…

For language teaching, the early 1970s marked a break from the behaviorist hold of audio-lingualism and a new perspective derived from cognitive code psychology and Chomskian linguistics swept the profession. The wave of methods born of this perspective predominated for a decade. In general, the 1980s have had less to offer language teachers in…

This paper argues for a dialectical conception of theory that avoids the problem of trying to yoke together theories that embody conflicting epistemological and idealogical concerns in any unified way. Called a "cognitive-social epistemic," this dialectic is a theoretical construct that subsumes a family of cognitive and social theories…

John Dewey's vision of communication posits an important ideal that educational researchers are hard pressed to meet, for the language that facilitates exchanges between scholars often encumbers their attempts to convey their work and findings to a wider, lay audience. The canons of inquiry (of foremost concern to researchers) rarely coincide with…

It is widely assumed that empowerment represents the organizational transformation strategy to help schools fulfill a broad array of announced goals, such as academic excellence, economic prosperity, military security, and social equity. This paper directs a demystifying light on the rhetoric and rationality of organizational transformation theory…

This paper views the enhancement of students' self-concepts as a high priority for school psychologists. It focuses on the theory, research and implications for practice regarding academic self-concept. Four models of the structure of self-concept and their resulting implications for practice are reviewed: (1) nomothetic; (2) taxonomic; (3)…

This paper describes the use of educational research and development resources by practitioners within the National Education Association's Mastery in Learning Project (MIL), a 5-year national second wave reform effort. Four research questions were addressed: (1) What are practitioners' information needs over time in the context of research-based…

Summarizing the wealth of recent research on sentence combining as an effective method of teaching students to tighten and vary their written sentences, this booklet explains how and why sentence combining works. The first half of the booklet provides background information on sentence combining, exploring the basis for the claim that sentence…

If content analysis is to satisfy the requirement of objectivity, measures and procedures must be reliable. Reliability is usually measured by the proportion of agreement of all categories identically coded by different coders. For such data to be empirically meaningful, a high degree of inter-coder reliability must be demonstrated. Researchers in…

Over the years, journalists, social scientists, and government commissions have defined news in a variety of ways, but their definitions consistently lack the notion that, above all, news is a commodity and must sell. Within the journalism profession, and particularly in television news, the potential for conflict between a media corporation's…

To investigate whether researchers are developing empirically-based public relations research efforts, and whether such efforts could be considered useful to public relations practitioners, a study conducted a content analysis of all articles published in "Public Relations Review" from 1977 through 1987. Articles (196 were coded in all)…