More effective nutrition education to reach low-income and ethnic minority populations is needed. As part of a project to develop a tailored nutrition education intervention to meet the needs of low-income Hispanics and non-Hispanics, complementary, mixed methods of formative research were used to determine specific characteristics of the target…

An important learning opportunity occurs during the question and answer (Q & A) session following student speeches. Not only do students benefit from the information conveyed in these speeches, but students also benefit from the cognitive stimulation the opportunity affords. Often, however, it seems that the Q & A session falls short of these…

The author admits that he has watched Jerry Springer on occasion. It is a guilty pleasure. The Springer show has come to represent the extremes in the society--perversion, unlikely pairings, lying, and cheating. Liberal Hollywood has been roundly criticized, and justifiably so, over the direction it has taken with much of the entertainment to the…

One of the key means by which knowledge is disseminated in the academic discourse community is the spoken presentation of papers at an academic conference. In contrast to the written research article, the spoken presentation remains relatively under-researched from a linguistic perspective, limiting the knowledge available for explicating this…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study is to assess some of the self-reported factors that students in the study used as choice criteria in making their school selection. Design/methodology/approach: The results of this study were obtained by conducting a series of focus groups involving incoming freshmen at a small liberal arts university…

A study investigated how repetition was used in the telling of personal narratives to create emotional involvement on the part of listeners, to evaluate stories, to prevent listeners from asking questions and from losing the story's focus, and to justify narrating that particular story in a cross-cultural setting. It was assumed that narrators…

The present study explored the ways in which the production of digital media, specifically podcasts (i.e., downloadable digital audio files), rooted in the key tenets of critical literacy, can support education for democracy, in addition to the overall benefits and barriers of podcasting in an elementary classroom. The project can be considered a…

This fact sheet summarizes data gathered in the 2009 survey of National Science Foundation (NSF) Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant recipients. Conducted by The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University, this was the tenth annual survey of ATE projects and centers. Included here are statistics about the program's grantees and…

Objective: To allow students an opportunity to speak publicly on the first day of class while becoming familiar with fellow students. The activity encourages students to examine the perceptions and stereotypes they have about one another by blindly guessing certain characteristics about their partner. By participating in the exercise, students…

Two years after the first low-cost radio-frequency audience response system using clickers was introduced for college classrooms, at least six different systems are on the market. Their features and user-friendliness are evolving rapidly, driven by competition and improving technology. The proliferation of different systems is putting pressure on…

Classrooms are filled with students with confident and vibrant voices, and most educators encourage them to use these voices in their writing. Many of the strategies of the process-centered classroom (peer editing, conferences, workshops, in-house publishing) also encourage students to write in real voices to real readers; however, there is still…

Cartoons are generally regarded as "kids' stuff," unworthy of scholarly study. As an aspect of popular culture, television cartoons do not attract scholars who are interested in being part of the "critical elite." Some scholars believe, however, that less time should be spent discussing how TV might be used to teach children…

As with commercial stations, the underlying premise of the college radio station is to serve the community, whether it be the campus community or the community at large, but in unique ways often geared to underserved niches of the population. Much of college radio's charm lies in its unpredictable nature and constant mutations. The stations give…

An undergraduate course at the University of South Florida called "Relationships on Film" treats movies as relationship texts to be "read" by active viewers. Through the semester, students engage film in two ways. First, they interpret films as response papers. Each week, students watch the assigned film outside of class. Then…

Written for Canadian public servants and written with their help, this handbook presents principles and tips to make official writing clear, concise, and well organized. The handbook defines "plain language" writing as a technique of organizing information in ways that make sense to the reader--using familiar, straightforward words. The…