There are fierce debates over the best way to prepare teachers. Some argue that easing entry into teaching is necessary to attract strong candidates, while others argue that investing in high quality teacher preparation is the most promising approach. Most agree, however, that we lack a strong research basis for understanding how to prepare…

This study examined 122 juvenile books to determine how current authors and illustrators portray books, reading, and writing and how this portrayal reflects current literacy theories and recommended instructional practices. The theoretical framework of this study is grounded theory (GLaser and Strauss, 1967). Categories which emerged from the…

A study compared the topics addressed in a professional trade publication, the RTNDA (Radio and Television News Directors Association) "Communicator," with topics specifically addressing broadcast news in the scholarly journals "Journalism Quarterly" and "Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media." The purpose of…

A study determined the levels of comprehension generated by questions accompanying the stories in new basal readers. A sample of 200 questions, 100 randomly selected from each of the 2 most widely used third-grade series (the Scott Foresman series "Celebrate Reading" and the McGraw-Hill series "A New View"), were analyzed for…

This study examined the office hour consultation between teaching assistants (TAs) and undergraduates from the participants' viewpoints. A total of 40 consultations involving five TAs from the economics department of a major American university were videotaped and transcribed. After dividing the consultations into three sections, namely initiating…

The Magazines section of this collection of conference presentations contains the following 15 papers: "'National Geographic Magazine' and the Vietnam War: Did We Just Get Pretty Pictures?" (John W. Williams); "Free Speech at All Costs: A Short History of 'The Masses'" (Chris Lamb); "Newspapers Locally Edited Magazines…

A study examined the levels of comprehension generated by questions in story-related and story-retell activities in the Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC) program. A sample of 500 questions from CIRC materials for grades 4, 5, and 6 were classified. Results indicated that the majority of story-related and story-retell questions…

A teacher has found a historical study of a newspaper's doublespeak to be consistently effective when it is used in an American studies classroom as a teaching model. As the Ku Klux Klan evolved in the 1920s, so did the Pekin, Illinois, "Daily Times's" deceptive coverage of the Klan. Doublespeak in news reports and editorials was used to…

A study investigated how much attention mass communication scholars writing in "Journalism Quarterly" give to each of the mass communication industries, to what extent the various media segments are studied, and how data from diverse industry segments are used. All 1,135 articles from both the main and Research in Brief sections of…

Comics help to shape, reflect, reinforce, and revise the beliefs and assumptions people have about themselves and others. This document addresses three issues related to the comics: (1) images of women in the comics by both male and female 20th century cartoonists; (2) conflicting and fragmented images of women in the comics; and (3) differences…

All adult biographies reviewed in "Booklist" in 1960 through 1964 and 1987 through 1989 were examined to see if the gender, racial or ethnic background, geographic setting, and occupation of the subjects changed over time. A total of 879 reviews from the 1960s and 1,103 reviews from the 1980s were examined. The analysis shows that subjects of…

There appears to be an urgency, influenced by demographic changes, to learn more about racially/ethnically diverse populations, and the counseling and psychology fields are acknowledging the need to respond to demographic changes. This study was conducted to assess the status of research as regards racially/ethnically diverse populations in the…

This paper addresses the microsemantic and macrothematic analyses of science and popular science texts from the fields of economics, medicine, and technology used in the "LSP [Languages for Specific Purposes] Texts in the 20th Century" project. Results show that the frequency of the relations is different within various parts of the…

A study examined the "oral" vocabulary used by newspapers over a 100-year period. Approximately 8,000 sentences containing about 200,000 words were chosen at random from the front pages of "The New York Times" and "The Los Angeles Times" for the period 1890-1989. Specific vocabularies were constructed for…

A study examined the distinctive communication phenomena which occur on computer bulletin boards, focusing on the Usenet bulletin board system which is estimated to have over half a million readers worldwide. Most universities and research organizations, all over the world, are capable of exchanging information over computer networks through the…