The writing program at the University of California at Santa Barbara offers a class for junior and senior art history or studio majors or film studies majors, although it attracts students from other related fields such as communications. It is specifically goal oriented and works best with students who have a knowledge of the arts. The class is…

This research abstract is based on two studies: first, "Student and Instructional Outcomes under Varying Student-Teacher Ratios in Special Education" and, second, "A Case Study Analysis of Factors Related to Effective Student-Teacher Ratios", both by Martha L. Thurlow and others. The studies investigated the effects of various student-teacher…

When reading educators encounter a student's interpretation of a text that is different than that which an author may have intended, they have to determine if such an interpretation is valid according to their criteria for students. Much of this rests with educators' conceptions of the reading process and the role of the reader in the…

Students who traveled to the United States to study ("student sojourners") were asked in a study to describe their initial expectations of teacher communication. Three research questions were probed: (1) Do student sojourners have articulated expectations and norms for teacher communication? (2) Do student sojourners experience…

One of the most common communication technologies being used in the classroom is the videocassette recorder. The videotaping of students' performances provides the instructor with a form of visual feedback that can be used to reinforce concepts and identify the strengths and weaknesses of the students' performances. Past studies have typically…

Intellectuals lament the disappearance of community, a nostalgia for the small town that has supposedly given way to the anonymous crowds of the city. Likewise, scholars have talked about "discourse communities" in romantic terms, referring to a place where all share the same values. However, a more urban view of social life, in which…

A postal survey on a random cluster sample of 1,032 secondary school students in Hong Kong was conducted to investigate how much students know about the environment and how their environmental cognition is shaped by the use of mass media. Results indicated that students were very knowledgeable on both general and local environmental issues. The…

"Farewll to Manzanar" (Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston), autobiographical account of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, might be used in a writing class to help students think deliberately about race and ethnicity. Writing about the book and researching the history surrounding it could serve to…

To ask students to write and respond to each other's papers is one means of confronting the difficulties posed by radical texts such as Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision," an essay from her collection "On Lies, Secrets, and Silence." When an instructor assigns such a work, he or she places him- or…

A storyteller, folklorist, music advisor and language arts teacher uses storytelling in his classroom to inspire students to talk, write, perform, listen, and learn. Beginning with a seventh-grade elective class, the teacher (an employee of the Foxfire project and not trained as an English teacher) decided to spend two weeks with the students…

A study of a junior-level grammar class for preservice teachers was conducted by an observer at Miami University of Ohio to determine the effectiveness of a Socratic teaching style that allowed the teacher to do most of the talking. Students in the class also participated in the observation; they were interviewed regularly by the graduate student.…

A study investigated the listening experiences of American university students who interviewed people from other cultures as part of a class project. A total of 103 individuals from African, Asian, European, Latin American, and Middle Eastern cultures were interviewed. Each of the American interviewers described his/her perceptions of five…

An English professor used science fiction to introduce his students to a range of questions about alternative sexualities. While a course proposal for a science fiction class being taught as a "diversity offering" with an emphasis on gender and sexual orientation was working its way through the bureaucracy at Pennsylvania State…

A study was conducted to assess the impact of heavier and lighter exposure to newspapers on students' readership of and attitudes toward newspapers and on their awareness of and interest in current events. Newspapers in six cities across the United States had students in grades 5 through 12 fill out attitude and information questionnaires at the…

A total of 47 twelfth grade students from five different English classes and the six teachers in the English department at a secondary school in Canada took part in a study to determine what effects traditional grade-based writing evaluation procedures had upon the process of writing. There were three distinct yet related components to the…