Introduces two books about magic, one a collection of essays "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," which describes the author's inherited lifelong passion for books and reading; and the other a novel, "Mangos, Bananas and Coconuts: A Cuban Love Story," which tells a story of love and magic that seems both real and…

Essay questions have been a stable fixture of teacher assessment activity for decades. Assessment reforms of the early 90's encouraged the development and use of "newer" forms of assessment including portfolios, performance tasks, and authentic assessments. As of late, however, there appears to be a regressive emphasis toward the use of…

An approach to essay grading based on signal detection theory (SDT) is presented. SDT offers a basis for understanding rater behavior with respect to the scoring of construct responses, in that it provides a theory of psychological processes underlying the raters' behavior. The approach also provides measures of the precision of the raters and the…

This paper argues that there is no other way to describe history, and particularly the personal life history of people, apart from in the form of a narrative. It also suggests that as history is not understandable, save in the form of a narrative, the narration as such "makes" history. Drawing on the findings of a research project on…

In this essay, Randall Curren identifies a type of liberalism that incorporates empirical claims about the development of agency and rationality, and responds to the criticism that liberalism rests on an incoherent conception of "autonomous agency." He argues that moral agents did indeed "become ghosts" somewhere en route from Aristotle to Kant,…

This article describes a photo essay contest of high school students in the Turning Point Program located in Ithaca, New York. The theme of the contest was "communicating what it means to have an emotional disability." The goals were to help raise awareness in the community, in the school, and in individual students about what it means…

A high school teacher describes her transformed approach to teaching writing and offers specific assignments that help students think outside their five-paragraph-essay box. She changed the way she taught the eight-standard students after she found that they had mastered their five-graph essay formula but had lost their voice and style of writing.

The assessment of student learning in general education courses is of critical importance in higher education. This study examined the utility of a particular writing assignment, application essays, as a course assessment tool in a basic communication course. Application essays are one page compositions asking students to describe a communication…

Drawing on existing work on popularizations, this investigation of book-length scholarly essays by practicing scientists across three disciplines reveals a hybrid genre that is neither popularization nor research report. The study utilizes both textual analysis and personal commentary from the writer-researchers to achieve a three-way comparison…

In fall 2000, Eastern Illinois University implemented an electronic writing portfolio (EWP) to assess students' writing skills. Students who were freshmen in fall 2000 and transfer students enrolling under the fall 2000 catalogue or subsequent catalogues must submit materials to the EWP. The EWP submissions come from each academic level as…

From the early 1900s to the present, there have always been inconsistencies in how teachers evaluate the writing quality of their students' essays. Their critiques vary as much as their personalities. To establish common standards in writing for all courses in which essays are assigned and, at the same time, not infringe on the integrity of…

This exploratory study examines student interpretations of pleasure and danger messages about sex in sexuality lesson plans. Scripting theory suggests that students do not simply hear and enact sexual scripts presented to them in sexuality education, but instead actively interpret, revise, weigh and attach meaning to these messages. We conducted a…

Historically, annotations have provided a means for discussing texts and teaching students about reading practices. This study argues that giving students annotated readings can influence their perceptions of the social context of a writing-from-sources task. Over 120 students read variously annotated letters to the editor, wrote response essays,…

This essay calls for qualitative policy analysis that can engage strategically with the increased calls for the usefulness of social policy toward the improvement of educational practice. Michel Foucault's concept of scientificity is used as a tool against the "repositivization" at work in neo-liberal times and its "rage for accountability" where…

Over the past two decades the interest and use of student portfolios for assessing student learning outcomes has grown considerably. This paper presents an overview of the portfolio approach to outcome assessment adopted by the Department of Management at California State University, San Bernardino and discusses major issues encountered over six…