In this article, the authors outline a collaborative writing assignment designed to familiarize students with critical thinking through the rhetoric of science. It is broken down into three parts: (1) teaching context; (2) dialogue assignment; and (3) critical context. Through these pedagogical segments, the authors provide teachers and students…

The teacher's of America's one-room schoolhouses long ago mastered the concept of differentiation. Small class sizes were the norm, including children of all ages. Older, or more advanced students, helped others understand their lessons. Students move on to more difficult work as they were ready. Skipping grades was not uncommon. As the population…

This article presents an assignment in which students are to research and report on a chemical reaction whose increased or decreased rate is of practical importance. Specifically, students are asked to represent the reaction they have chosen with an acceptable chemical equation, identify a factor that influences its rate and explain how and why it…

Current approaches and trends in writing pedagogy within the composition classroom focus on the development of students' identities through personal, cultural, or disciplinary processes. By employing writing assignments and activities that concentrate on developing certain traits or characteristics of students' identities has led to a "crisis"…

Purpose: A medicine education web site was developed during a research project in 2002-2004 to help teachers in primary and junior secondary schools to teach children the proper use of medicines. However, there was a need to develop further the assignments for the youngest schoolchildren. The aim of this study is to evaluate the usefulness of…

This study explores student reflections about issues related to equity, diversity, and social justice from an educational foundations course. Online reflections and course assignments were analyzed from 15 aspiring administrators for patterns. Findings indicate that (1) students were willing to engage and reflect on their experiences and cultural…

One of the unique promises of sociology is to illuminate the intersection of the personal and public by encouraging largely individually-oriented students to examine interrelationships between themselves and the social world. This can be an especially challenging task when teaching introductory sociology courses that are populated largely by…

The paper reports and discusses a government-initiated nationwide assessment of writing proficiency among Norwegian compulsory school students. A sample-study of 7th and 10th grade students are discussed and reported with regard to challenges in measuring writing skills in a valid and reliable manner. For the 7th graders the results showed a…

Service-learning has become a popular pedagogy because of its numerous and far-reaching benefits (e.g. student interest, engagement, and retention). In part, the benefits are a result of the student learning while providing a service that reflects a true need--not simply an exercise. Although service-learning projects have been developed in the…

The "highly qualified" teaching credential required by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is forcing new models of secondary special education service delivery. One effect has been a reduction in special education content classes and a concomitant increase in co-teaching. In one teaching arrangement, "instructional…

Students learn more effectively with personally meaningful tasks. Thus, students learn more if they have a say in deciding what specific topics and examples are being discussed in class. Naturally, the instructor knows what topics are important to cover in a course and which ones might be optional. Finding the right balance between students'…

The number of academic eBooks in university libraries is increasing. Reading digital materials such as newspapers is valued in Hong Kong; however, students' perceptions of the value of reading academic eMaterials are not well known. In this study we investigated 12 students' use of academic eBooks on mobile readers in two ways. Six students had…

This study investigates the infusion of intercultural inquiry into subject-area curriculum courses in a teacher education program. Drawing from data that include questionnaires, student assignments, and interviews, the research focuses on how student teachers responded to critical explorations of diversity within curriculum courses in second…

Most teachers only dream of their students spending the amount of motivation, attention, passion, and critical thinking on their classes that some students do playing videogames. This investigation examines the success, pitfalls, and lessons learned from incorporating videogame-like components into an educational technology class. For example,…

This qualitative study investigates the invented spellings of young EFL writers in terms of the relationship between phonological awareness and internalized grapheme-phoneme principles. Two kindergarteners and two first graders participated in weekly English writing tasks for 14 months. Results obtained from protocols of the students' free writing…