We assessed the benefits of employing microthemes--short in-class writing assignments designed to facilitate active learning--as pedagogical tools in psychology courses. Students in target course sections completed 10 in-class microthemes during a semester. We designed the microthemes to serve as active learning assignments that would enhance…

Writing in mathematics can improve procedural knowledge and communication skills and may also help students better understand and then remember problems. The majority of mathematics teachers know that they ought to include some writing assignments in their instructional plans, but the challenge of covering the curriculum and the time required to…

This study examines student preferences and behavior when navigating online multimedia modules dedicated to teaching cultural aspects associated with an L2, and the contribution of the online multimedia format of the modules to raising interest in these cultural topics. It focuses on student options regarding reading texts on the modules' main…

Online collaborative writing tasks are frequently undertaken in forums and wikis. Variation between these two communication modes has yet to be examined, particularly type of feedback and its effects. We investigated the type of feedback and the impact of English native-speakers' feedback on Spanish peers' discourse restructuring in the context of…

This study investigates Web-based, project oriented, many-to-many collaborative writing for academic purposes. Thirty-eight Fulbright scholars in an orientation program at a large Midwestern university used a Web-based word processing tool to collaboratively plan and report on a research project. The purpose of this study is to explore and…

This article describes the ways the authors incorporated team-building activities into our online business writing courses by interrogating the ways that kinesthetic learning translates into the electronic realm. The authors review foundational theories of team building, including Cog's Ladder and Tuckman's Stages, and offer sample exercises they…

This article describes the process used by one high school teacher to incorporate writing into her classroom. The teacher made several modifications to her curriculum to provide her students with opportunities to engage in online research, and produce text for real-world audiences. The students' comments indicate that although they were initially…

This study evaluated how effective an online academic integrity module was at reducing the occurrence of plagiarism in a written assignment for a university course. In a preintervention comparison group, plagiarism was detected in 25.8% of papers submitted, compared with only 6.5% in the group that completed the academic integrity module. The…

Sociological imagination is a quality of mind that cannot be adopted by simply teaching students its discursive assumptions. Rather, it is a disposition, in competition with other forms of sensibility, which can be acquired only when it is practiced. Adhering to this important pedagogical assumption, students were assigned to write their…

This article describes how one such teacher, Shirley Thacker, developed and implemented a successful writing program in her first grade classroom, which is known as Thackerville. Shirley describes how she motivated a classroom of first-graders to use the writing process in a workshop format and how this approach affected the children's perceptions…

From her experience as an instructor, the author finds that it is valuable to engage graduate students in conducting a study within their qualitative methods course. In this article, the author discusses how she used a collaborative autobiographical research approach. Class members generate autobiographical writing to be shared with the group, and…

In this time of high-stakes tests and school accountability, English classrooms have been pushed to become increasingly serious places. Combining NCLB pressures with desires to use literature to do important cultural work--such as fighting ethnic, gender, and social-class discrimination--virtually bans humor from the classroom. This is unfortunate…

Stonier, a second grade inclusion teacher, wanted to instill a love of writing in all 25 of the children in his class while offering a challenging curriculum for everyone. He made the children's writing meaningful by setting up a writing exchange with high school students. The project, beginning with the second-graders offering critiques of the…

Capstone courses emphasize students' experiences and learning, rather than course content. This emphasis is consistent with principles and practices fundamental to humanistic education. Here we describe a capstone course, "Internship," that includes five features consistent with humanistic education: (1) student-centered learning, (2) empathic…

The purpose of the conference presentation upon which this paper is inspired was to present an innovative approach to motivate students to write in a second language during a first-year Spanish class. Usually, students comply with writing exercises that convey basic thoughts, due to constrained vocabulary and limited knowledge of grammatical…