Primary sources in religion and history enable first year university students to connect "content-based" linked courses in the core curriculum. Fifty-four first year university students in three separate pairs of courses worked in teams to present oral critical reports on texts related to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the…

During the past year the Center for Research on Developmental Education and Urban Literacy (CRDEUL) has moved from the former General College (GC), which after 74 years of service to a diverse student body closed its doors on June 30, 2006, to the University of Minnesota's new College of Education and Human Development (CEHD). The new mission…

Increased opportunities for undergraduate students in agricultural and natural resource disciplines to write for diverse audiences besides their instructor may increase motivation to write and improve student writing skills. The objectives of this teaching research were to determine and compare the initial writing experience of students enrolled…

This study examined the attitudes of elementary school teachers and students toward portfolio assessment. A total of 11 teachers and 116 students in grades 3 through 5 responded to open-ended questions regarding the benefits of portfolios for highlighting students' written work. Teachers were asked about the strengths and weaknesses of portfolio…

A simple, but useful, handout given to mothers of young children can greatly increase the likelihood that they will present aspects of emergent literacy in their homes. The concept of emergent literacy states that all literacy learning begins in infancy and proceeds forward from that point, and that all of the literacy skills of oral language,…

Postmodernism claims to shatter the mirage of essentialism by denying the image of a unified self. The result, it asserts, is the freedom to assume a new kind of authority, signified in the image of the "subject position." It assumes, further, that because the writer is capable of multiple selves, he or she will perforce manifest…

Increasingly, students in public schools, colleges, and universities are exposed to United States history and literature via commercial and cable television and the motion picture industry. If students are going to use videotapes of historical and literature-based films as short cuts to learning, then faculty are obligated to structure videotapes…

This report provides outcomes for 1995-96 for Monroe Community College's Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) program, an effort designed to help students learn to write in all disciplines through writing centers staffed by student writing fellows. Following introductory remarks, the report provides discussions of the following topics: the future…

Intended specifically for tutors who want to use proven teaching techniques but who have limited time and resources, this book offers dozens of teaching ideas as well as useful information on curriculum development, instruction, and appropriate reading materials. The teaching strategies in the book were adapted from articles published in the…

Addressing the expressed needs of the writing community, this book presents writing lessons for intermediate, middle school, and secondary school students that incorporate the 5-step writing process into content areas as a natural part of the curriculum. The 30 lessons in this book involve students in large and small groups and in individual…

Collaboration in writing is not confined to conventional multiple authorship and peer editing, but extends across the text to include its readers. Strong support for language development comes from dialogic situations in which student writing is created as a response to some other utterance, and yet classrooms rarely support such situations. The…

This brief report summarizes a longer document with the same title. It reviews literature on the importance of using active learning teaching techniques in the classroom, describes what active learning is, discusses how this technique can be incorporated into the classroom and identifies barriers to the use of this approach. Strategies that…

By applying the principles of total quality management (TQM), freshman composition can be taught in a way that focuses on the customer (the student), engenders a willingness for continuous improvement, builds quality into the process of writing, empowers the student to become responsible for his/her work, and allows students to make the necessary…

This paper demonstrates with specific examples from various students' journals how subtly and, at the same time, pervasively ethnocentricity expresses itself, and offers suggestions on how to assess and combat ethnocentric beliefs through writing assignments and classroom exercises in an international business law course at Indiana University. The…

A study examined the extent to which literacy tasks were emphasized within a fourth-grade social studies classroom. Subjects, 21 fourth-grade students and their teacher at a private K-8 elementary school located in an urban area of the east, were observed over a 7-week period as they conducted a thematic unit on liberty. Data included audiotapings…