A study examined an experimental curriculum developed to enhance students' literacy and social studies skills. Videodisc and text materials (the films "Young Sherlock Holmes" and "Oliver" and stories by Charles Dickens and Conan Doyle) were used to create a "macrocontext" for learning. The curriculum evaluation…

Essays on the use of journal writing in the classroom are presented in four sections: the language of speculation, journals in the teaching of English, the arts and humanities, and the quantitative disciplines. Titles and authors are as follows: (1) "Dialectical Notebooks and the Audit of Meaning" (A. E. Berthoff); (2) "Desert…

"Math Notebook" is published five times a year as a supplement to the "NCTM News Bulletin." This document consists of the five issues published during 1990. Each issue is devoted to a single math topic. The five topics represented here are: (1) "Concept of Number"; (2) "Basic Skills: Development of Number Concepts" (a continuation of "Concept of…

The articles in this journal issue present a variety of teaching methods to enhance writing instruction. The titles of the articles and their authors are as follows: (1) "Writing for Real World Audiences in the Classroom?" (James P. Beck); (2) "Copycatting: Learning to Write by Imitating" (Mary Ann Stemper); (3) "The…

Designed for Pima Community College (Arizona) instructors, this booklet presents 50 sample writing assignments developed for 38 non-writing courses. Three types of assignments are represented: (1) short papers, which are usually one to five pages long, require few research skills, and allow students to use the instructor's feedback to produce…

Designed for students enrolled in an Abnormal Psychology course at Howard Community College (Maryland), this booklet explains the requirements for the course's writing assignments, which are designed to teach the skills of comparison and contrast, analysis, critical thinking, and synthesis. Following an overview of class assignments and…

An argument is put forth for restructuring the community college curriculum around recurring constructs common to all disciplines. First, introductory comments review various perceptions of essential learning, offering support for the position of constructivists and proponents of writing across the curriculum that learning is an activity and a…

The case approach to academic writing requires a student to use subjects in an active way while writing. This approach, appropriate in content courses as well as in composition classes, improves a writer's logic more quickly and effectively than concentrating on logic alone. In the case approach, a student is given a body of information about a…

Typically, efforts by English, speech, and developmental reading departments to make students "complete communicators" have been confined to one or two basic skills courses giving unsuccessful "one-shot" inoculations in the theory and practice of one of the communication competencies. As such communication is not taught in the context of the…

A business French course developed at Utah State University was designed to meet the students' need for knowledge of the specialized vocabulary and expressions in a French-speaking business environment. These vocabulary needs include language for use at work, in daily living, and in employment-seeking. A business French text was chosen and…

An ethnographic study examined the role of language in an economics classroom. The researcher became an undergraduate economics student for one semester and concluded that the language practices in that economics classroom were represented neither by the transmission model nor the process approach to writing. The most valuable part of this…

Given that very little is known about the kinds of writing experiences students have in content areas beyond writing for evaluative purpose, a study investigated how writing tasks interact with learning and also how the instructional context in which writing is embedded influences what students contribute to and take from writing. The effects of…

Focusing on how expert writers in various disciplines convey complex ideas, this paper shows how the techniques used by the mathematician, Clark Kimberling, in various writings can (1) be transferred to other disciplines, (2) show learning taking place, and (3) provide models for students to re-enact learning in all subject areas. The paper…

Intended as a guide for elementary school teachers to assist them in preparing and implementing specific literature units or in developing more long-term literature programs, this book contains 13 focus units. After defining a focus unit as an instructional sequence in which literature is used both as a rich natural resource for developing…

Based on a project concerned with studying invention across the curriculum, this paper discusses an across-the-curriculum writing program that encourages students to take control of what they are studying, contributing to what is known rather than being passively filled by it. The paper (1) challenges the current notion that creative behavior is a…