In this study, we explore the heuristic decision-making skills of undergraduate students as they incorporate information into their persuasive speeches. We interviewed 26 students enrolled in an introductory communication course to ascertain their information literacy for vetting sources for their public speeches. From their responses, we…

Asking questions is an important component of promoting inquiry and argumentation in the science classroom. We investigated the relationship between the cognitive depth and format of teacher-generated questions to be used with classroom response technologies. Twelve middle school science teachers were randomly assigned to write either constrained…

Multimodal literacies have been incorporated as social learning practices in content areas, but research regarding multimodality within secondary mathematics instruction has often lacked the sociocultural lens. The author describes practitioner action research in the form of a case study (with one focal participant) from a public high school. The…

Flourishing in today's global society requires citizens that are both intelligent consumers and producers of scientific understanding. Indeed, the modern world is facing ever-more complex problems that require innovative ways of thinking about, around, and with science. As numerous educational stakeholders have suggested, such skills and abilities…

In this exploratory case study, we consider how students in an undergraduate biochemistry class engaged in the process of argumentation within an inquiry-oriented learning environment to investigate a chemical mechanism in a particular part of the tricarboxylic acid cycle. Audio/video recordings of student groups during the mechanism discussion…

While adult literacy programs have historically been marginalized within the US educational system, there is growing interest in making these programs more academically effective. Because of this, the General Education Development (GED) exam was recently revised to be more rigorous, especially in its assessment of writing. Although these changes…

While scientific argumentation has been a robust topic in the research literature, much of the evidence from this area has been on learning science through text. This study was designed to analyze how individuals generated scientific evidence following engagement in a web-based global climate change simulation. Prior to engagement in the…

This article explores the power and potential of a role-play collaborative argument project centered on a literary work that has been banned or challenged in schools. In the project, students read a banned or challenged novel as they prepared to play the role of a community stakeholder (parent, teacher, librarian, minister, etc.) at a simulated…

A novel instrument, the Features of Excellent Arguments task (FEXA), was developed to elicit adolescents' judgments about argumentative essays displaying to varying degrees features characteristic of strong persuasive writing: academic language, rich evidence, multiple perspectives, and rhetorical appeal. We collected students' categorical choices…

This paper presents the comparison between English writing skills on narrative and persuasive writing of students of Secondary School Certificate (SSC) and Ordinary level (O level). In this quantitative study, we selected private schools of Lahore that offered both streams simultaneously. We developed the Essay type test with the help of English…

This study aims to exemplify how language teaching can benefit from learner corpus research (LCR). To this end, this study determines how L1 and L2 English speakers with diverse L1 backgrounds differ with respect to adjective amplification, based on the "International Corpus of Learner English" (ICLE) and the "Louvain Corpus of…

Embracing a lot of functions, metadiscourse markers are among the most significant factors which affect L2 writing quality. In the present study, whether explicit teaching of metadiscourse markers has any effect on EFL students' writing proficiency was investigated. The participants (N: 21) of the study included freshman students majoring in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an approach to teaching opinion writing in the primary grades that combined collaborative reasoning with strategy instruction. Four teachers and 80 students were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions for 10 days of instruction in opinion writing. Students wrote opinion essays…

Research has shown that collaboratively produced texts are better in quality compared with individually written texts. However, no study has considered the role of collaboration in authorial voice, which is an essential element in current writing curricula. This study analyzes the effects of collaborative task performance in the quality of L2…

In contrast to traditional science instruction, which encourages students to memorize facts from textbooks, today's science instruction emphasizes the adoption of scientific process skills by students, as well as the teaching of critical thinking skills. Lebanese Chemistry teachers detected lack in middle school and high school students' critical…