This article describes a language simulation involving six distinct phases: an in-class quick response, a card game, individual research, a classroom debate, a debriefing session, and an argumentative essay. An analysis of student artifacts--quick-response writings and final essays, respectively, both addressing the definition of liberty in a…

This study investigates the relationships between connectedness in discourse and the in-text comments that tutors write on postgraduate essays at a Thai university. Connectedness was divided into cohesion, propositional coherence and interactional coherence which were analysed using Hoey's lexical analysis [Hoey, M. (1991). "Patterns of lexis…

The increasing use of computers to enable or replace face-to-face tutorial discussion groups in higher education is creating a new form of academic writing. This small-scale study of 43 students and three tutors identifies ways in which students present their opinions in a forum which allows greater time for reflection, but also creates a…

The use of function words in 135 essays written by deaf college underclassmen in developmental and credit-bearing English composition classes is described and compared with Standard English (SE) versions of the same essay. If student and SE versions were the same, this was considered mastery; if the student omitted a word, this was considered…

In this essay Maureen Ford examines a selection of situated knowledges discourses in order to make explicit their attention to political effects. She contends, first, that the "epistemic public(s)" constituted through these discourses are multiple, interactive, performative, and layered, and further that they are explicitly political in ways that…

No published studies have sufficiently focused on essay topic writability from the perspective of college writers of the new millennium including native English speakers and ESL speakers. In this study, 500 college writers in Metro Toronto in Canada were interviewed to uncover if they found some essay topics easier than other topics. The results…

Time and opportunity to discover truths are essential in education. Discovery takes repetition and trial and error. Discovery crosses intellectual and disciplinary boundaries as well. What is learned through the diverse experiences of one's academic and individual lives will pollinate each other if there is room left for discovery. The tyranny of…

Engaging emotions in multicultural education is an important but a relatively neglected issue in teacher education. This essay calls for pedagogical attention to the role of emotions and attempts to analyze how teaching autobiographies and films sheds light on the emotional dynamics of multicultural education. Two films, "The Color of Fear", and…

This study aimed at expanding a new field of educational measurement, by investigating the feasibility of using computer programs for the automatic analysis and evaluation of student writing. Essays written by secondary students in their English classes were rated by multiple independent judges on a number of traits usually considered important:…

E-rater[R] has been used by the Educational Testing Service for automated essay scoring since 1999. This paper describes a new version of e-rater (V.2) that is different from other automated essay scoring systems in several important respects. The main innovations of e-rater V.2 are a small, intuitive, and meaningful set of features used for…

The process of figuring things out probably is more intriguing than anything else. Metaphor and memory contribute to the figuring out which is done in two personal essays: "Think about It" by Frank Conroy and "The Hidden Teacher" by Loren Eiseley. Metaphor and memory close distances between text and reader, and evoke conditions…

An autobiography class at Elizabethtown College (Pennsylvania) used one of its four technique paper assignments to focus on the exploratory essay, since the concept of exploration, simply for the sake of questioning, probing, and testing, has both validity and purpose in a class or assignment focusing on autobiography. First the class brainstormed…

Summarizes some thoughts of Stephen W. Hawking who proposes that certain kinds of communications across the event horizon are possible, that they lead to the evaporation or explosion of the black hole, and, therefore, that classical or quantum mechanical causality has no meaning. (GS)

The two experiments described show that college students in psychology can slant their essays in the direction of originality when the teacher's expectations are made clear to them. (Author/RM)

A study examined the reaction of college freshmen to 30 essay test prompts to determine if rhetorical factors in the prompt would affect a student's choice of that prompt. The subjects, 40 college freshman enrolled in an introductory English course, rated eight rhetorical qualities of the essay prompts: (1) whether the essay would be easy to…