Instructional guidelines for grade 3 objectives being tested by the Texas Assessment of Basic Skills (TABS) are presented. The guidelines are designed to be helpful to primary grade teachers in clarifying expectations regarding the TABS tests. Looking at the grade 3 basic skill descriptions will indicate what students in kindergarten through grade…

A study was conducted to test whether quantitative feedback would help students write with the stylistic simplicity appropriate to their audience and purpose without sacrificing other elements of good writing. Two business and technical writing classes received identical reading assignments, classroom activities, and writing assignments; but one…

Presented are 65 participation-oriented environmental education activities for teaching basic skills in language arts and mathematics. Intended for students in the elementary through high school grades, lessons are classified by grade level and subject area. Each lesson plan describes the purpose, lists required materials, and explains the…

The Fitchburg, Massachusetts, school system's writing program designed to meet the requirements of the commonwealth's Basic Skills Improvement Policy is discussed in this paper. The skills sequences that were selected for use in the areas of composition (levels kindergarten through grade 12) and mechanics and usage (levels two through nine) are…

This paper specifies the assessment of those spelling skills that are needed for effective writing by students in grades one through six. An introductory section provides background materials, including explanations of how the skill specifications were selected and how they are presented in this report. In the sections that follow the…

A study was conducted to test the following four hypotheses: (1) more subject-area writing will produce better writing, (2) more subject-area writing will reduce writing apprehension, (3) the frequency and amount of learner-centered writing about a subject will increase learning of that subject, and (4) concepts students write about will be…

Teaching guides and a teacher's manual for a two-year individualized writing program useful for mainstreaming learning disabled students into the English class are given in this document. The teaching guides provide daily lesson plans for 34 weeks of lessons at the seventh and eighth grade levels. The lessons are based on a space shuttle theme and…

This handbook is offered to help content area teachers in their efforts to extend the development of writing skills beyond the English classroom and to help students prepare for the New York State Regents Competency Test in Writing. Two sections of the book discuss ways of introducing writing into the content area classroom and responding to…

Questioning as an after-reading activity is not sufficient alone as a strategy to develop reading comprehension. This paper presents instructional strategies to support comprehension throughout a student's particular reading encounter. Included are four strategies which involve students: (1) have students specify content expectancies in a variety…

The effectiveness of the Kates method of teaching composition, which involves regular, sequential writing assignments and teacher/student conferences, was investigated using an experimental group of 142 ninth-grade students in six classes and a control group of 78 students in two classes. The experimental classes wrote approximately 14 essays in…

A study was designed to identify highly teachable composing skills that have a strong statistical relationship with composition quality across various grade levels. Sample compositions were randomly selected from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (1972). A total of 750 compositions written by 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old-students (250…

This is the first report arising from a large-scale research project on the development of skills in English in the primary schools of Sydney, Australia. Specifically, it reports on a study of the extent of the relationship among the four communication skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) in a sample of 314 children and on a…

One in a series of ten mini-manuals on office communication and proofreading, this booklet for business and office students provides instruction in the use of periods, question marks, exclamation marks, and semicolons. Included are terminal and specific objectives, punctuation rules and related information, and tasks for practice. A test over the…

One in a series of ten mini-manuals on office communication proofreading, this booklet for business and office students provides instruction in the use of numbers in written communication. Included are terminal and specific objectives, usage rules and related information, and tasks for practice. A test over the information presented concludes the…

One in a series of ten mini-manuals on office communication proofreading, this booklet for business and office students provides instruction in proofreading for errors in written communication. Included are terminal and specific objectives, a list of the commonly used proofreading marks and related instructions, and tasks for practice. A test over…