Not too many years ago, right about the start of the new millennium, the TAMU-CC Writing Center began to pull away from the model of a center that focuses mostly on individual consultations and began to build a greater sense of the place of the Writing Center in the larger university Writing Community. In this article, we share how we have built…

This qualitative study investigated the relationship between adolescents' sense of school belonging and opportunities to integrate aspects of their identity with their 9th-grade English assignments. The study provided evidence of a positive relationship between these two experiences for an ethnically diverse group of students. Moreover, issues of…

Looking for a "habanero" (extremely hot) lesson to engage first-year Spanish language students in an in-depth study of Spanish-speaking countries? This article offers an overview of how the authors used 21st-century tools to get students excited about the not-so-new assignment of reporting on the people and culture of another country. Chances are,…

Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) methodology uses Web-based tools to gather student responses to questions on preclass reading assignments. However, the technological requirements of JiTT and the content-specific nature of the questions may prevent some instructors from implementing it. Our own JiTT implementation uses publicly and freely available…

This essay presents results from a comprehensive study of writing in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Pittsburgh. It is in two sections. The first section reports on interviews with faculty from across the disciplines in the School of Arts and Sciences; the second reports finding from student focus groups and from an extensive…

The language shortcuts used in text messages are becoming evident in students' academic writing assignments. This qualitative study sought to determine if the use of the shortcuts has an adverse impact on developmental students' spelling and grammar skills. This research was based on the constructivist theory, which rationalizes that students use…

In the county schools, students are assessed every nine weeks based on a writing prompt using a rubric supplied by the county, but the students are often taught using Writer's Workshop. This action research attempted to determine if Writer's Workshop and the use of writing prompts have different effects on first graders' writing ability and…

In vocational education, a challenging issue is to help apprentices build integrated knowledge from workplace training and school teaching. The present research proposes a learning design in which apprentices are required to write with a reciprocal peer-tutoring approach about situations they encountered in the workplace in order to help in…

This paper is a literature review report concerning educational uses of Wikipedia in the first 10 years of its existence. The aim of the work is the tracing and the presentation of published and validated educational applications of Wikipedia in a manner that could inform learning design by teachers or researchers. For the review, 24 scientific…

From 2004-2007, the University of Memphis carried out the NSF-funded Tri-P-LETS (Three P Learning Environment for Teachers and Students) project to improve local high-school computer science curricula. The project reached a total of 58 classrooms in eleven high schools emphasizing problem solving skills, programming concepts as opposed to syntax,…

Traditional teaching styles practiced at universities do not generally suit all students' learning styles. For a variety of reasons, students do not always engage in learning in the courses in which they are enrolled. New methods to create and deliver educational material are available, but these do not always improve learning outcomes.…

Calibrated Peer Review[TM] (CPR) is a web-based instructional tool that encourages "writing gain for students" without adding "grading pain for the instructor!" The use of CPR provides students frequent opportunities to hone both writing as well as peer review skills in a guided environment. And once an assignment is authored, instructors have…

A content analysis of multicultural counseling syllabi from the Council on Rehabilitation Education (CORE) accredited programs was conducted. Using CORE accreditation standards that apply to Social and Cultural Diversity knowledge and outcome areas (Section C.2) and Middleton et al. (2000) proposed multicultural competencies and standards for…

Finding relevant digital images to create presentation boards requires advanced search skills. This article describes a course assignment involving a technique designed to develop students' literacy skills with respect to locating images of desired quality and content from Internet databases. The assignment was applied in a collegiate apparel…

Students come to the classroom with life experience that may reinforce stigmatization of those who struggle with addiction. Educators must address this dynamic directly if addiction practitioners are to move beyond their personal experiences and come to understand the neuroscience of addiction, evidence-based practices, and the human potential for…