This article demonstrates how to improve students' learning motivation by means of an attributional dialogue between teachers and students. Students are asked to describe events and to explain to what they attributed success or failure. Dialogue pages of a typically achieving learner and a student with learning disabilities are provided. (Contains…

Discusses the importance of relating mathematics to students' everyday lives. Describes a journal-writing project developed in a 5th grade total-inclusion classroom and specifies the major features of the writing project, including the framework used to assess student learning. (KHR)

Examines journal writing as a teaching/learning technique enabling students to connect specific course concepts to their experiences. Uses a questionnaire to assess student attitudes toward journal writing. Finds students believe journal writing stimulates critical thinking and provides feedback about learning. Teachers agree journals provide…

Journal writing in action research can be a tool for uncovering the facts of a situation (an empirical approach), or the expression of a professional life (a phenomenological approach). These two approaches are explored, and a radical redefinition of action research journal writing is presented. (IAH)

Examines the dialogue journals of a student teacher and her cooperating teacher. Notes that dialogue journals provide a means of (1) discovering and reinforcing knowledge; (2) initiating students into the professional community; and (3) allowing both teacher and student teacher to assess and affect their experience. (MM)

In one technical writing course, students write frequently in journals in a variety of exercises, including summarizing articles for other students, responding to topics introduced in class, writing drafts of papers, and clarifying teacher comments. The technique has proven effective in helping students organize thoughts and develop writing…

Three articles focus on many classroom activities and experiments inspired by the voyage of two canoes, built of traditional materials, from Hawaii's Hilo Harbor in 1995. Nationwide, students followed daily satellite tracking, accessed the Internet for updated accounts of the canoes, talked directly with navigators, and watched television…

Notes the dangers of "generic" early childhood curricula. Draws on a teacher's journal to describe letting preschoolers build their own learning from "natural" learning materials--including plastic and cardboard pipes, palm branches, buckets, chains and pulleys--and how the teacher supported their growth. (HTH)

Describes a high school biology assignment that had students read a self-selected book where the main character experiences nature and is changed by it. Evaluation was based on journal entries and a formal paper. Seventy percent of the students indicated they greatly enjoyed the assignment. (PR)

Discusses an integrative study of a seventh grade language arts class in which students were given the opportunity and the challenge of designing their own course of study. Describes designing the unit, getting started, exploring death and dying, class discussions and journal writing, literature groups, and individual papers. (RS)

Presents descriptions of six class activities: students writing in journals at home; a vocabulary development activity; a two-week unit on publishing for first graders; word maps for adjectives and verbs; a program to sensitize fifth graders to the elderly; and sustained silent reading. (RS)

One college writing teacher's approach to teaching, characterized by reflection on the relationship between what she knows and what she does, is described. Techniques include structured assignments and specific suggestions for revision, cooperative learning, interest in individual students, and use of a personal journal for exploring problems and…

Describes a qualitative study of affective variables in the second-language experience. The study used as its data, graduate students' self-report papers about their Community Language Learning experience, which revealed three affective variables--anxiety, motivation, and attitude. (41 references) (JL)

Illustrates how social interaction with high quality literature can foster the literacy process of responding to literature with the student's own voice. Demonstrates ways that particular instructional processes can foster critical literacy processes as students share their interpretations of quality literature. (MG)

Reviews several "little" books that can provide material for children's research based on the Montessori Time Lines and classification charts for geography, plants, and animals. Suggests classroom activities to support the beginning reader's curiosity. (HTH)