Courses: Argumentation, Public Speaking, Political Communication. Objectives: After completing this unit activity, students should be able to (1) demonstrate comprehension of Burke's (1941) concept of terministic screens; (2) apply the concept of terministic screens to write a brief political autobiography of themselves that analyzes the history…

An essay's motive or research problem consists of the rhetorical moves illuminating why that essay matters--what puzzling elements of a primary source it resolves, which contradictions in the data it explains, or what gaps in the literature it fills. This article invites college instructors to dedicate some of their classroom time to teaching…

In many cases, teachers shy away from including much writing because of the many hours it requires to read and provide substantial feedback on such papers. Yet writing is widely understood as critically important to learning (Applebee & Langer, 2013; Mayher, 1983; Zinsser, 1989). This article describes a program from the Northwest Arkansas…

This study aims to explore students' argumentation and decision-making relating to an authentic socioscientific issue (SSI)--the problem of environmental toxins in fish from the Baltic Sea. A multi-disciplinary instructional module, designed in order to develop students' skills to argue about complex SSI, was successfully tested. Seven science…

This symposium, "Barack Obama's Significance for Rhetoric and Composition," aims to provoke and renew disciplinary conversations about the meaning of an age now nearly past, as well as to pose questions that resonate for presidential rhetoric generally. It includes: (1) "Obama's Rhetoric: Black Talk Flow, White Folk Fluent"…

Whether novice or experienced, writers must come to terms with the daunting task of filling up a blank page, or screen, in an effort to produce writing. Student writers are no different. They enter teachers' classes having confronted similar difficulties with discovering what it is they want to say. In seeking to help students, they devote…

This article presents an effective model for a manageable interdisciplinary project that shows students the connections among art, English, and other disciplines; gives composition students an external audience for their writing; and emphasizes the importance of research in the process of creating arguments and art. This interdisciplinary project…

The aim of this study is to explore the effects of argumentation-based science learning (ABSL) approach on 9th Grade of Secondary Education students' creative thinking skills. The sample of the study included 22 9th grade of Secondary Education students in Bayburt in 2012-2013 academic year. In this study quantitative research method and…

This study, entitled, "Texture and textuality in Political Discourse: A Study of Cohesive Devices in President Goodluck Jonathan's Inaugural Address-May, 2011" was an analysis of the lexical cohesive devices employed by Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan in crafting his May, 2011's Presidential Inaugural Address (PIA). Guided by the…

This study was conducted in order to determine the differences in integrated scientific process skills (designing experiments, forming data tables, drawing graphs, graph interpretation, determining the variables and hypothesizing, changing and controlling variables) of students (n = 17) who were taught with an approach based on scientific…

This paper investigates the possible complementary effects that training in empathy and nonverbal communication may have on persuasion capabilities. The narrative considers implications from the literature and describes an exploratory study in which students, in a managerial setting, were trained in empathy and nonverbal communication. Subsequent…

All classrooms are active social systems; the middle school classroom involves complex interactions between and among peers as well as between students and teachers. In the elementary years, attention is often given to nurturing students and fostering relationships, yet when young adolescents transition to the middle school, a focus on control and…

This article characterizes "engagement in science learning" from a sociocultural perspective and offers a mixed method approach to measuring engagement that combines critical discourse analysis (CDA) and social network analysis (SNA). Conceptualizing engagement from a sociocultural perspective, the article discusses the advantages of a…

This paper explores the annotation and classification of students' revision behaviors in argumentative writing. A sentence-level revision schema is proposed to capture why and how students make revisions. Based on the proposed schema, a small corpus of student essays and revisions was annotated. Studies show that manual annotation is reliable with…

The purpose of this study was to investigate preservice science teachers' collaborative knowledge building through socioscientific argumentation on healthy eating in a multiple representation-rich computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. This study was conducted with a group of preservice science teachers (n = 18) enrolled in…