Teachers are hungry for strategies that will motivate their students to engage in reading and writing. One promising method is the Authoring With Video (AWV) approach, which encourages teachers to use captioning software and digital video in writing assignments. AWV builds on students' fascination with television and video but removes the audio…

The Poetry Generating Loop is a new kind of generative writing circle that offers concrete, creative ways to get students involved in and excited about poetry. By writing poems in groups, students are able to learn poetic terms and experiment with techniques through their writing--a process that can shed new light on the world of poetry. (Contains…

This paper examines the processes whereby two researchers developed their knowledge in teaching a course for preservice teachers. We sought to explore the ways in which class assignments encouraged preservice teachers to develop their abilities to see classrooms from the point of view of nascent teachers rather than that of successful students.…

The study of emotion as discourse not only eliminates objections about the individual psychology of students, it also connects researchers to methods that go beyond reflection and self-reporting. In this article, the author pursues these ideas within the context of a college composition course where students experienced a particularly high level…

Students in four biochemical and biological engineering courses for upper-­level undergraduates and graduate students were required to write a research proposal. Breaking the requirements down into segments (such as a summary with specific aims, rough draft, and final draft) due on different dates helped make the assignment more manageable for the…

This article describes how school libraries can support a rewarding collaborative effort with the school's physical education teachers by offering reading materials such as commercially available sports information packets, fiction and nonfiction books, Web sites, and magazine or newspaper articles available in hard copy or online. Such a program…

A one-time survey may give a falsely precise indication of local usage. Examining four iterations of a library assignment survey reveals large within-discipline variation; even individual faculty members are inconsistent in their use of library assignments from year to year. Additional causes of variation include changing faculty and pedagogy.…

Items of mental rotation tests can not only be solved by mental rotation but also by other solution strategies. A multigroup latent class analysis of 24 items of the Mental Rotations Test (MRT) was conducted in a sample of 1,695 German pupils and students to find out how many solution strategies can be identified for the items of this test. The…

Several months after having completed an introductory economics course, most students are no better able to answer simple economic questions than students who never took the course. The problem seems to be that principles courses try to teach students far too much, with the result that everything goes by in a blur. The good news is that a…

This study examines the relationship between achievement goals and some important learning-related variables in the completion of a course assignment. The research on achievement goals is reviewed and two contentious issues--the nature of performance goals and the effects of multiple goals--are highlighted. Three hundred and seventy-three Chinese…

Our recent review of content assessments revealed that language expectations and proficiencies are often implicitly embedded within the assessment criteria. Based on a review of performance assessments used in high school biology settings, we have found a recurring discrepancy between assessment scoring criteria and performance expectations. …

A writing workshop is a pedagogical tool that can create a more productive experience for teachers and students alike. Business students who have used this technique with experienced instructors agree that a well-planned writing workshop can be useful for dispelling writing fears, furthering understanding of business communication skills,…

Entrusting students with the responsibility of creating a programme brings into play various cognitive and linguistic abilities as well as organizational and team work skills, such as researching a topic, planning and visualizing the format and presentation, editing a collection of shots and clips into a coherent whole, interviewing people,…

Stimulating the interest of students in biological sciences necessitates the use of new teaching methods and motivating approaches. The idea of the self-expression assignment (SEA) has evolved from the prevalent environment at the College for Women of Kuwait University (Safat, State of Kuwait), a newly established college where the number of…

The authors have been using components of team-based learning (TBL) in two undergraduate courses at the University of Texas for several years: an educational psychology survey course--Cognition, Human Learning and Motivation--and Introduction to Statistics. In this chapter, they describe how they used technology in classes of fifty to seventy…