Research has shown that an audience can make a great difference to a musical performance but limited research has explored this with primary school-aged children. Using an action research study, participants from a primary school choir, students in fifth and sixth class formed into a choir through a compulsory singing programme, were surveyed to…

Revisions in writing aim at text improvement. Literature has shown that revision activity differs between novice and experienced writers. Our ultimate goal is to understand how children and adolescents develop the capacity to shift perspectives from language producer to language recipient -- a prerequisite ability to successful revision. In this…

In this Teaching Tips article, the author argues for a dialogic conception of voice, based in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. He demonstrates a dialogic view of voice in action, using two writing examples about the same topic from his daughter, a fifth-grade student. He then provides five practical tips for teaching a dialogic conception of voice in…

Opportunities to read and analyze others' writing or to observe readers as they analyze writing might enhance one's own sense of audience and improve one's own writing. This mixed-methods study investigated whether reader and observer activities in comparison to writing practice activities affected fifth-grade students' persuasive writing and…

Fifth grade teacher Molly Toussant realized with chagrin that she habitually mouthed her precepts about teaching writing in the same rote way she had recited the Apostles' Creed in Sunday school, and that her students had no idea why they had to write "like every day." So she wrote this explication in which she shows, with many examples, how her…

This article discusses the author's use of a performance-based evaluation in his fifth grade Spanish class in a K-5 public elementary school located in Princeton, New Jersey. The author realized the need to break the old testing paradigm and discover a new way of demonstrating student language acquisition since the traditional tests did not seem…

As digital portfolios become more prevalent in teacher education, the purposes and processes for creating them have become contested. Originally meant to be critical and reflective spaces for learning about multimedia and conceived as contributing to professional growth, research shows that digital portfolios are now increasingly being used to…