The purpose of this research was to examine the effectiveness of teaching fifth grade students with reading difficulties a genre-specific strategy for summarizing and critically analyzing written arguments. In addition, this research explored whether learning this particular reading strategy informed the students' ability to write effective and…

Writing skills are considered essential to lifelong success, yet experts cannot agree on one model or set of traits that distinguishes good writing from poor writing. Instructional strategies in developing student writing at the high school level need to include a means by which students receive immediate, specific feedback that acts as a scaffold…

In this commentary, anthropologist Iris Carter Ford reflects on the preceding pieces by Carmen Kynard and Signithia Fordham. She identifies parallels among the two essays and her own life, drawing out themes that emerge from the narratives. Integrating ideas about "talking black" and "talking back," Ford notes that both phenomena have roots in…

This essay explores the ubiquity of the sustainability agenda in higher education in the United Kingdom (with some parallel examples from the United States) with a view to pointing out its corrosive influence on educational ambition. In so doing, the author suggests that the prevalence of sustainability within education has only been possible…

This article describes a writing workshop that took place with 41 low-income, multi-ethnic 12th-grade students who received instruction on specific genre features for writing college admission essays. As a result, students improved the quality of their college admission essays and demonstrated greater confidence with this writing task. This…

This article considers the claim that machine scoring of writing test responses agrees with human readers as much as humans agree with other humans. These claims about the reliability of machine scoring of writing are usually based on specific and constrained writing tasks, and there is reason for asking whether machine scoring of writing requires…

In this article, part of the Why I Teach essay series, the author shares how he developed his love for teaching and the failures and successes he experienced as a teacher. He used to hate teachers but everything changed when he entered college. He took general education classes and began to notice the difference between the great teachers and the…

This article presents the winners of the 2008 Cliff Weiss Memorial Essay Contest and their winning essays. The winners are Spencer Terry of Tulsa, Oklahoma (secondary), and Carrie Snyder-Renfro of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (postsecondary). The topic for secondary students is "How would you communicate the impact and importance of CTE related to your…

Service-learning projects are becoming more prevalent in Information Systems education. This study explores the use of community-based research, a special kind of a service-learning strategy, in an Information Systems web development course. The paper presents a case study of a service-learning project to develop an educational web portal for a…

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of two task types on foreign language written production. Particularly it addressed the issue of how three aspects of language production (i.e. fluency, complexity, and accuracy) vary among two different task types (i.e. argumentative writing task and instruction writing task). One hundred sixty…

Argument has been referred to as the umbrella under which all reasoning lies--"the more general human process of which more specific forms of reasoning are a part". In this paper, the authors present an evidence that argumentive reasoning skills can be assessed and developed in facilitative settings. They focus on middle school as an optimal…

In this article, the authors report on an assessment project they recently conducted at their open admissions community college to assess student work at the end of the basic writing sequence. The authors' focus for this project was on the way students used essay structure. They gathered artifacts from students who were deemed "ready" by…

Although the quality, performance and future of public library services in the UK is a matter of debate, there is little doubt that in recent years, despite claims relating to the emergence of a cyber-society, interest in library buildings and the library as "place" has been intense, almost matching that seen during the Carnegie era of…

Christensen discusses why teachers need to teach students "voice" in its social and political context, to show the intersection of voice and power, to encourage students to ask, "Whose voices get heard? Whose are marginalized?" As Christensen writes, "Once students begin to understand that Standard English is one language among many, we can help…

Forms of expression and representation other than writing have unquestionably been revolutionised by developments in new technology and computer software. Digital photography has made it possible to alter and enhance the original image in an almost infinite number of ways. Music software programmes like Cubase and Sibelius make it possible to…