Service learning has been recognized as an effective pedagogical tool in the writing classroom. It has also served to help students develop an awareness of diversity and multicultural issues. In this article, the author examines the benefits of service learning in a basic writing course designed for students of color attending a disproportionately…

Anniversaries of major historical events, such as the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision, "Brown v. Board of Education," provide social studies teachers with the opportunity to connect their classroom study to broader public conversations about the event and its significance. This article reports on one such…

In this article, the author discovers an approach to teach her budding instrumentalists using an approach that is centered on the early development of aural skills and on research that links ways of learning music to those of learning language. This approach is based on her experience in adapting Gordon's Music Learning Theory, although many of…

The aim of this report is to present the findings of the second phase in a longitudinal study of the impact of changes in the TOEFL® test on teaching and learning in test preparation classrooms. The focus of this phase was to monitor six teachers from five countries in Central and Eastern Europe as they received news about changes in the TOEFL and…

This brochure makes a case for devoting more attention to writing, and demonstrates through recent research results that the National Writing Project (NWP) has had a positive impact on teachers and students across the country. Independent national scorings of student writing show that NWP student improvement out paces that of students in carefully…

Federal legislation requires that supplementary aids and services be provided to students with diagnosed disabilities to assist them in accessing the general-education curriculum. Such modifications to the curriculum may include assistive technology (AT) devices and services. AT can be any item, piece of equipment, or teacher-made product that is…

It is argued that assessment of student writing can be enhanced by adoption of a functional approach to linguistic analysis; through their research, functional grammarians have provided language teachers with criteria for evaluating the extent to which learners have gained control of the grammatical and discourse features of a variety of…

This workbook is designed to present the process of developing instructional materials to persons who want to write teaching material for a specific and defined readership group. Developed by many people in various educational organizations who have writing and editing experience, it is especially relevant for writing teaching materials for adult…

A fourth-grade teacher developed a unit on writing designed to help his students go from oral to written text after finding that only 4 of the 22 in his classroom had the organizational and writing skills to get their ideas on paper. The basis of the unit was a unique problem which the teacher himself was trying to solve in real life; namely, how…

This study examined whether the reading, writing, and mathematics skill statements derived for the Praxis I Basic Skills Assessments and the Pre-Professional Skills Test (PPST) are considered by educators to be important for entry-level teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students. The study is based on a survey of 833 teachers, administrators,…

While the process of getting together a writing portfolio might help some students to understand how one is assembled, not all, or even most, graduates will have need to go through the process again in their lives. All the more reason, some would say, for them to do it now, but there are any number of reasons why this assumption should be…

In 1992, the English Department of Florence-Darlington Technical College, in South Carolina, initiated a freshman composition program utilizing computer word processing in a full-term writing workshop format. The program includes 12 to 16 sections of English 101 taught in classrooms containing 22 networked computers, while software consists of…

At study was undertaken at California's College of the Canyons (CoC) to investigate the relationship between students' self assessments of skills on Computerized Assessment and Placement Programs forms and results from assessment tests in mathematics, reading, and writing. Data were collected on students who enrolled at the college in fall 1995…

This study identified courses associated with improvements in the writing skills of 455 first semester, freshman undergraduates at a large research university. Secondarily, faculty who taught these courses were interviewed to explore their teaching practices, course designs, and evaluation techniques. The same group of students was invited back…

This Digest looks at recent research, and then asks and considers some important questions about choosing a handwriting program for young children, i.e.: (1) which alphabet is developmentally appropriate; (2) which alphabet is easier to use; (3) which alphabet is easier to read; (4) which alphabet is more easily integrated; (5) which alphabet is…