Offers three strategies from "Strategies for Teaching: Guide for Music Methods Classes," that was developed under the leadership of MENC's Society for Music Teacher Education. Gives guidelines for methods teachers to prepare their students for incorporating the National Standards for Music Education into music instruction at all grade…

Biologists at Center for Biological Research found ways to improve their scientific writing without benefit of an English-language program. By tapping Internet biology forums for comprehensible input, and using computer-assisted retention strategy to profit from error correction, writing improved. Scientific dialog on Internet has helped group…

Controlling for precollege aptitude and other influences, a study found male intercollegiate football and basketball players tended to have significantly lower levels of second-year writing skills and third-year critical-thinking and reading-comprehension skills than nonathletes and athletes in other sports. There was little evidence of similar,…

Draws on a study of socioeconomically disadvantaged children's acquisition of school literacies to investigate how children's writing and drawing might be key elements in developing critical literacies in elementary school settings. Focuses on how such classroom writing can be a mediator of emotions, intellectual and academic learning, social…

Explores prerequisites for a successful Web-based distance education learning experience. Discusses technical requirements, including reliable equipment, fast Internet connections, and being comfortable with using the technology required; and personal characteristics, including high motivation, time commitment, ability to cope with lack of…

With the current intensity surrounding the No Child Left Behind Act, science has moved to the back burner at many schools. Educators everywhere are allotting less time for science. Many teachers have adapted by bringing reading and writing into the science program, but more often than not this has meant using science textbooks to teach the…

Students learning a new language need a great deal of language support. Those who teach students learning English as their second language know that any language support is crucial for students' language acquisition. Therefore, English Language (EL) students need a variety of language experiences. They need opportunities to hear, write, speak, and…

Ohler describes the practice of making a digital story, which he defines as a brief narrative usually told in first person, combining writing with digital images and sound, and presented as a short movie. The art of digital storytelling, he asserts, enhances the teaching power of storytelling by teaching students valuable technical skills,…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether music instruction was related to significant gains in the development of young children's phonemic awareness, particularly in their phoneme-segmentation fluency. Beginning in January 2004 and continuing through the end of April 2004, each of four intact classrooms of kindergarten children (n =…

Research literature on writing storybooks overlooks first graders. This is puzzling as children enter first grade having emergent literacy, in reading, writing, and story composition. It may reflect the belief that at this age children should learn to read and write (conventionally) as the curriculum demands, while elaborate writing is assumed to…

This study investigated cross-language and writing system relationship in biliteracy acquisition of children learning to read two different writing systems--Chinese and English. Forty-six Mandarin-speaking children were tested for their first language (Chinese-L1) and second language (English-L2) reading skills. Comparable experiments in Chinese…

Using multiple baseline designs, we studied the effects of having seven 9th graders edit their papers until a naive reader accomplished a drawing assignment during writer immersion (communication in writing only). During Experiment I, students received no feedback in the first phase, teacher editing feedback in phase 2, and writer immersion plus…

Extra classes are increasingly observed in both developed and developing countries. In Vietnam, a country where education reforms are at their height, extra classes are proliferating and have become a concern to society and the government. Although the government has banned extra classes that are independent of school administration, teachers…

Undergraduate biology curricula are being modified to model and teach the activities of scientists better. The assignment described here, one that investigates protein structure and function, was designed for use in a sophomore-level cell physiology course at Earlham College. Students work in small groups to read and present in poster format on…

Estimates indicate that as much as 80% of an engineer's work time is spent on communicating. Studies done by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Arizona show that engineering firms, as well as ECE graduates, rank writing ability as the most important skill in determining engineers' success, even above…