General assumptions about student class preparation time may be tenuous and research is needed to determine the accuracy of preparation time and relationship of preparation time to course outcomes. (Editor)

Notes the benefits of homework and discusses aspects of homework including individual student involvement, different kinds of homework, meaningful work, the attraction of creativity, advantages of feedback, grade level and time concerns, schools-home linkage, a homework mission statement, and purposeful homework versus busy work. (SR)

This paper seeks to use a corpus-based analysis of assessment commentaries on Master's level assignments to shed light on the guidance practices of those who provide feedback. The analysis offers a set of functional categories that emerge from the corpus and uses these to consider the degree of transparency evident in the commentaries. Based on…

An intact second-grade class of 13 African-American students had completed few chapter-book reading assignments. A consultant worked with their teacher to develop an intervention that consisted of paired readings and two interdependent group contingencies. Following the implementation of the program, all students began reading chapter-books and…

Teachers are generally kind and nurturing people. Students who plagiarize their assignments from these kind and nurturing teachers are often given a second chance when caught and encouraged to do their work over, but it would be better to eliminate their need to plagiarize. The first tip for eliminating plagiarism has not so much to do with what…

History teachers are frequently frustrated in their efforts to promote class discussion. Class discussion is useful to deliver or reinforce content and to explore or share ideas. Yet teachers learn quickly that they cannot expect good discussion, especially good whole-class discussion, to take place when they want it to. One approach to the…

For the last four semesters my courses in Shakespeare have used QwikiWiki and MediaWiki, two versions of the wiki software, for writing exercises and directed reflection on language--including both by the students about Shakespeare's language, and by the teacher/researcher regarding the students' performance in "Writing to Learn". In experimenting…

A collaborative, statistics education research project (Lovett, 2001) is discussed. Some results of the project were applied in the computer lab sessions of my elementary statistics course. I detail the process of applying these research results, as well as the use of knowledge surveys. Furthermore, I give general suggestions to teachers who want…

The purpose of this study was to examine students' perceptions of a self-study assignment, a requirement for a life-span human development course. A survey assessing attitudes regarding the value of the writing assignment was completed by 278 students. Results suggested that students had an overall positive evaluation of the assignment. The…

Narrative interviewing (also termed qualitative interviewing) is a valid and vivid way to apply perspectives and concepts in gerontology to individual lives. As such it is widely used as a research method. However, teachers in many fields also assign interview projects for students, as supplemental assignments in aging-related courses. This…

By reflecting on Japanese internment camps executed by the U.S. government in World War II, this article examines camp schools' curricula and writing assignments and an English teacher's response to student essays to show how racially profiled students and their Caucasian teacher negotiated the political meanings of civil rights and freedom.…

This article describes a graduate course in spirituality in counselling with the hopes of encouraging and supporting other counsellor educators in preparing and offering their own courses in this area. Learning objectives, activities and assignments are outlined. Students' personal experiences of the course are shared through excerpts from their…

The design and effects of using online pre-laboratory exercises in an introductory first-year university chemistry course that requires no previous knowledge of chemistry for non-major chemistry students is reported. The results have indicated that the majority of students involved in the study considered that their learning opportunities were…

Can short, ungraded, free-writing assignments promote learning of course material? We randomly assigned introductory psychology recitation sections (N = 978 students) to writing or thinking conditions. For all sections, teaching assistants presented students with a discussion topic based in current coursework. Students either wrote or thought…