In technical writing classes, audience is one of the most important concepts. Technical writing is typically written to a specific audience for a specific purpose. In addition, as audiences change, so must the way a document is written. An audience's lack of knowledge in a technical area, for example, would require more background information or…

While most faculty and graduate students have opportunities to meet and begin networking at local, regional, and national meetings and symposia, the same opportunities do not exist for most undergraduates. At least four needs of undergraduates might be served by developing dedicated listservers and encouraging students to begin using…

A study explored gender differences in toy preferences, using 824 children's responses to a southeastern newspaper's request for letters to Santa Claus. The results suggested that it is in the choice of toys associated with some aspect of the adult social structure where children's preferences show the greatest gender differences. Changes in toy…

Interweaving sociological/interpretive and cognitive/linguistic perspectives, this book explores the ways in which children first encounter the written word in formal schooling. The book examines the "culture" of literacy as it is introduced and practiced in a corpus of 163 basal and supplementary readers used in a representative…

This document compares English-language Bible-based picture books by religious publishers and trade publishers, offering an assessment of quality and authenticity of traditional literature in this genre. Discussions of the genre's history, of recent sales trends, and of the contribution of exposure to Bible stories at a young age to later cultural…

Scanator is an extremely valuable tool in the functional analysis of qualitative stability in text building behavior during writing. Scanator also allows for a detailed investigation of subtle changes emerging in the structural relations of emergent novelties. This study focused on the extension of the application of Scanator to one pair of…

A study examined the research base for public speaking instruction. Persuasive speaking, informative speaking, and audience analysis and adaptation in five introductory public speaking textbooks were examined. Four of the texts were selected because they have survived in the marketplace through multiple editions; the fifth book was selected…

A study quantitatively reviewed empirical studies of negative political advertising using a method that combined citation analysis and content analysis. The citation analysis examined each individual cited work in 20 selected studies with respect to its citation information, and the content analysis investigated the 20 selected studies (citing…

A study examined six third-grade basal readers (from the years 1969, 1986, and 1993) to determine whether there has been a significant change in the portrayal of women characters throughout the years. Results: (1) showed more female main characters in the 1993 textbook sampled than in the textbooks from earlier periods; (2) found that female…

Many have argued for the importance of numeracy, yet little is known about the opportunities for numeracy available to people in their daily lives. In this study, characteristics of rational numbers in magazines written for children, teenagers, and adults were analyzed and compared. Analysis indicated that difficult mathematical concepts that…

The subjects of "Current Biography Yearbook 1970" and "Current Biography Yearbook 1991" were analyzed to see if the gender, race/ethnic group, geographic setting, and occupation of the subjects had changed over time. ("Current Biography" is a collective biographical source that contains short profiles of currently…

This report is a summary opinion of current high school health textbooks. The report states that although high school health textbooks generally treat marriage respectfully they are intellectually weak, often poorly informed, and marred by factual errors. The 11 topics discussed include: (1)"Why Textbooks Matter"; (2) "The Good…

This theme issue of the serial "Educational Foundations" contains five articles devoted to the topic of "Studies in Empowerment." In "The Disempowering of Empowerment: Out of the Revolution and into the Classroom," Margaret D. LeCompte and Kathleen Bennett deMarrais focused on placing the term in proper historical…

A study examined the visual presentation of characters on five prime time network dramas, popular with the elderly, which star elderly actors. The title sequences of each show ("Murder, She Wrote,""The Golden Girls,""Matlock,""Jake and the Fatman," and "In the Heat of the Night") were analyzed. Results indicated seven significant interrelated…

The purpose of this study is to determine responsibilities expected of newly-hired academic reference librarians and background experiences they are expected to possess. The content analysis of 3 months' worth of reference librarian job listings from three 1990 issues of "College & Research Library News" led to a profile of…