This practicum addressed the issues of declining enrollment and the anticipated problems resulting from the loss of a kindergarten program in an early childhood center. (Enrollment is expected to decline as the public schools moved to all-day kindergarten.) Goals of the practicum were to increase enrollment in the early childhood center, expand…

This public awareness package is designed to help crisis nursery and respite care programs for families with special needs children to increase the visibility of the programs' services, increase use of their services by families, enhance collaboration with other agencies, and assist with fund-raising efforts. It describes the advantages and uses…

The oldest of the mass communication technologies, books, needs to be examined in mass communication research. Accordingly a study analyzed the structure and format of the "New York Times Book Review" to identify its dual roles: evaluating books and providing information crucial to book marketing. Also explored was how the text of the…

Some of the literature on the role of teaching culture in second language instruction is reviewed, with some emphasis on the work of Ortunio and the Kluckholn model of French culture. One instructor's use of French print and television advertising to teach French culture is described. Values such as intellectuality, traditionalism, and patriotism…

Advertising history is often treated within the context of journalism or mass communication history. The outline of a seminar course in advertising history presented in this paper offers an approach that discusses the social, cultural, and philosophical roots of advertising as well as the institution as it is known today. The focus of the course…

Right brain and left brain dominant people process information differently and need different techniques to learn how to become more creative. Various exercises can help students take advantage of both sides of their brains. Students must feel comfortable and unthreatened to reach maximal creativity, and a positive personal relationship with…

A study was conducted to examine message evaluations of selected public service advertisements (PSAs) by a young adult population and to test whether local and nonlocal source attribution would influence those evaluations. In addition, the study investigated the extent to which audience characteristics such as fatalism (the degree to which a…

Using popular culture in my developmental writing course has prompted me to reconsider what it means to create successful developmental writing assignments. Having slipped into the questionable habit of assuming that removing complexity makes an assignment appropriate for developing writers, I pared down a fairly open-ended "media…

Research shows that information received by one brain hemisphere (e.g., auditory messages entering the right ear) is processed and transferred to the other, interpretation being a combination of right and left brain processing, with high intensity messages shifting control from the left to the right brain. If information is received by one…

This paper points out that one of the most appropriate and needed areas in which students should engage in critical thinking is in their everyday responses to messages aimed at them in attempts to persuade and convince them to buy or believe something. Ten commonly used tactics noted in the media are described. Examples are given of slanted or…

Black females are infrequently represented in advertisements in leading fashion magazines and, when they are featured, their presentation may be designed to distance them from the product they advertise. All advertisements in the January and July issues of "Cosmopolitan,""Glamour," and "Vogue" magazines between 1986…

This study examined the role of women as portrayed in the mass media, focusing on the depiction of women in the traditionally passive role as compared with men in the traditionally aggressive role. The analysis of media coverage was highlighted by the examination of women and men in magazines, billboards, television, and newspapers between January…

A study compared the decision making process of large and small advertising agencies to determine if the size of the agency, in terms of gross annual billing, had any effect on adherence to the rules set forth in the American Association of Advertising's Standards of Practice. Forty agency employees, 20 from agencies with billings less than $2.5…

In advertising, a creative idea can be defined as being right or on strategy in a unique way. For a copywriter, it is not easy to create an ad that has the "Big Idea" in it. Some helpful techniques that advertising students can use to generate creative ideas are (1) analogy, (2) forced relationships, (3) doing the opposite of what…

An exploratory study examined the perceptions of creative directors and broadcast production managers in advertising agencies regarding the perceived effects of the 15-second commercial upon creative formats and production techniques. A sample of 600 randomly selected advertising executives and managers were surveyed using a 55-item mailed…