Provides an outline for an exercise for junior high and high school students that encourages them to develop a philosophy of life in the form of resolutions, similar to those written by Jonathan Swift, Benjamin Franklin, and Jonathan Edwards. Cites examples of resolutions written by students. (PA)

Describes how the author and her high school English students begin their study of Thoreau's "Walden" by mining the text for quotations to inspire their own writing and discussion on the topic, "How does Thoreau speak to you or how could he speak to someone you know?" (SR)

Considers how many students walk into the class with an array of technical communicating perspectives that open the door for practical experiences. Believes that a technical communicator employs the ethnographic process for the purpose of creating technical documents. Presents an ethnographic framed assignment that requires a collaboratively…

Presents an assignment in which students look through a handful of poetry collections or anthologies, seeking 20 poems they like and thus understand or want to understand to some extent. Describes the benefits of this assignment, including honing students' interpretive skills, dispelling their misconceptions about the genre, and continuing their…

Schools seem to serve certain groups of people over others. Schools become "sorting mechanisms in which select groups of students are favored on the basis of race, class, and gender." Students within the dominant culture gain cultural capital, while students outside the dominant culture are often left without the means to gain entry into…

Lab reports are the dreaded assignments of the laboratory course. Students dislike them, because they can be tedious and time-consuming. Instructors dislike them, because they significantly increase the grading load. For this reason, lab reports are often omitted or replaced by alternatives such as responses to lab questions, fill-in-the-blank lab…

High school teachers' experiences of teaching their students how to write a proper writing assignment and the people who have influenced their teaching of writing are described.

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…

The study reported on here explores the claim that computer conferencing is a valuable environment for students to rehearse academic debates and arguments which can then be drawn on in their written assignments. In order to carry out the exploration, the functional linguistic concept of ENGAGEMENT was employed. ENGAGEMENT comprises six sets of…

Although academic writing in higher education has been the focus of research efforts for more than two decades, the specific writing experiences, needs and difficulties of undergraduate nursing and midwifery students have remained largely under-researched. This article reports on a project that investigated the nature and dynamics of academic…

The typical use of science notebooks is for students to record information as they complete an investigation, writing down their procedure, observations, data, results, graphs, and any other factual information pertaining to their experiment. The author did the same, but also incorporated specific writing assignments to prepare students to publish…

In this article, the author discusses how her sixth-grade students gained writing skills and learned to "dream big dreams." She wanted to celebrate literacy, and also create something that could raise funds to support literacy projects, so she challenged her students to write to their favorite authors and ask each for a recipe. The end result of…

A case study on the teaching of writing, this paper discusses what motivates students in a freshman writing course to complete increasingly difficult writing assignments. The study provides a glimpse into how one class of freshman students developed positive expectations for writing a paper about a difficult poem by helping each other map…

Reading several documents from the early history of Francis W. Parker School and an essay by John Dewey entitled "The Need for a Philosophy of Education" helps the author's students gain some precision in defining what otherwise remain rather loosely held opinions about the core values of the school. For most of the students, these…