Increasingly, national stakeholders express concern that U.S. college graduates cannot adequately solve problems and think critically. As a set of cognitive abilities, critical thinking skills provide students with tangible academic, personal, and professional benefits that may ultimately address these concerns. As an instructional method, writing…

In this book, experienced educator and presenter Betty Hollas offers scores of strategies for building strong writers in the classroom. Designed with an eye to saving teachers time, the book focuses on: (1) The 3 key things every student needs to remember about each trait; (2) Which books make good read-alouds for the classroom--even for just…

This article examines the potential of personal storytelling as a pedagogical method. When incorporated into the educational experience, autobiographical stories serve as a primary and fruitful link between lived experience and curricular content, a connection integral to adult learning. These stories enable learners to identify congruencies and…

This paper discusses the implementation of a project in which a writer-respondent intervention was used to develop the academic literacy practices of students. Writer-respondent projects are based on the idea that detailed developmental comments and questions on students' draft writing can assist them in acquiring the peculiar norms of academic…

This paper presents an easy and free online tool that has visually enhanced teachers' writing-response pedagogy and helped their students comprehend their composing. Create a Graph is a free and intuitive online data-graphing program developed by the National Center for Education Statistics. In three clicks a visual depiction of weaknesses or…

A valuable lesson about teacher ownership and its power to move a school forward was learned by the author as she worked with a professional development initiative on assessment: No matter how closely a district-level leader thinks she is connected to and trusted by a staff, the collective commitment, focus, and action of the teachers themselves…

A study examined the effectiveness of incorporating writing as a tool to master the concepts of physics. Subjects were students in the three traditional physics classes and one non-math or conceptual physics class at East High School in Rockford, Illinois. The instructor tried a variety of methods--students wrote criticisms of Carl Sagan videos,…

During the 1994 fall semester, an instructor taught an English 101 section at Central Arizona College-Superstition Mountain Campus that used readings from Graham Flegg's "Numbers: Their History and Meaning" as the basis for 3 of the assigned readings. Only 3 of the 5 assigned essays were based on math--as opposed to all of them--for…

Suggesting that teaching the literature of the Vietnam War can enliven literature study in the middle and secondary school classroom, this paper explains why this literature can have such a powerful impact on students, and how teaching it fosters students' responses to literature. The paper begins with a discussion of why students should study and…

Personal narrative writing can be encouraged and used effectively in classes and in in-service workshops because it is accessible, because the writers may use their own voices, because they can tell their own stories, and because it helps them to make sense of their own experiences. However strong the case made for this form, though, there are…

Based on the tenets of Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, five preconditions for dissonance arousal were operationalized in a counterattitudinal essay writing task. The five preconditions were: perceived choice, irrevocable commitment, minimum incentive, perceived responsibility for consequences, and foreseeability of negative…

This book is designed to provide teachers with numerous ideas about how to infuse mathematics and writing into their classroom in creative and challenging ways and to encourage students to visualize, speak, and write about math. The activities described here can help students communicate mathematically and realize that there is more to math than…

While working as a special consultant for General Mills in 1948, John Dos Passos wrote a report explaining the latest scientific research and technological advancements and how the postwar economy was affecting General Mills and the cereal market. General Mills, using a real writer for a corporate freelance, profited from Dos Passos' expertise and…

In an effort to provide students with instruction in academic writing early in their college careers, a project was undertaken to link a developmental composition course to an introductory psychology course at Washington's Bellevue College. The two professors designed a sequence of four papers offering practice in two of the more common academic…

Designed primarily with the student in mind, this guide focuses on what the student needs to know about essay writing to survive in college. It details a proven, consistent, and effective method for the preparation of undergraduate essays across the disciplines. Not intended as a textbook, the guide speaks directly to the student, providing…