In our essay we discuss Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory of a reading event. Second, we summarize Carole Cox and Joyce Many who applied the transactional theory and designed a 1-5 point continuum to stories and films. Third, we summarize film theorists David Bordwell's constructivism; Richard Wollheim's central imagining and…

Moment-to-moment emotions are affective states that dynamically change during reading and potentially influence comprehension. Researchers have recently identified these emotions and the emotion trajectories in reading, tutoring, and problem solving. The primary learning-centered emotions are boredom, frustration, confusion, flow (engagement),…

What is the hold of literature on a reader's imagination, on my imagination? I remember many hours spent with books in a kind of romantic entanglement, and heartful obsession, and joyful reverie. I certainly remember being lost with words, lost in enthusiastic abandonment. I loved the sounds of words, and the images they conjured, and the…

Concerns about the relation between critical and creative writing are reviewed in the context of encouraging students to engage in both kinds of writing as a response to literature in undergraduate degree courses. In particular the paper seeks to illustrate and promote good practice in the integration of creative and critical written responses to…

"Asking Students about Teaching" seeks to establish that student surveys provide valid evidence that can be used for evaluation of and feedback for teachers. The report then proceeds to advise practitioners about optimal practices for administering student surveys and using survey information. As the report contends, student surveys are a useful…

The commentaries to our target article "Towards a systemic theory of gifted education" differed in their assessments of the various arguments we put forward. Of the more than 40 responses to our target article, 27 responses were chosen as being representative of all commentaries. We grouped the responses according to the main points in our target…

In large measure the authors agree with Tobias and Fletcher's (2012) comments stating that clearer operational definitions of game features are needed to enable research on games and learning. The authors cannot accept that games are a subset of simulations, preferring to identify instances when games and simulations overlap and when they do not.…

In his essay on the role of creativity in science and of science in society, Hisham B. Ghassib (2010) points out that science is much more a series of common attitudes and practices rather than a clearly delineated set of methods. The author agrees. The author also agrees that scientific knowledge is playing a key role in the forward development…

Ghassib's (2010) paper is an interesting historical and philosophical discussion on the topic of knowledge production and a productivist industrial model in science. As I see it from the point of view of education, a weakness of the paper relates to the lack of discussion of the notion of creativity in science. The title includes the word…

This study investigates the impact of the implementation of "Literature Circles" in an Active Learning classroom in relations to developing soft skills among university students. The use of Literature Circles is a well-known strategy in teaching the students to be more creative, independent, and think out of the box. A group of…

This article describes a model used to explore cultural understanding in English as a foreign language reading in a developing country, namely Argentina. The model is designed to investigate, analyse and describe EFL readers' processes of cultural understanding in a specific context. Cultural understanding in reading is typically investigated…

The purpose of this study was to examine how the social practices of African American families--with children in grades K-2--changed as a result of participating in a family literacy program utilizing African American children's literature. The families were exposed, through a series of workshops, to an abundance of children's literature…

A question that captured our attention many years ago and continues to motivate our work, although the audience for that work has expanded and contracted over the years, is "What about reading?" In this essay we adopt a term used to frame discussion at the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)--remix--to revisit in three…

The author describes how culturally relevant children's literature allowed teachers and teacher candidates to explore the lived realities of diverse students. Through the author's qualitative investigation of 23 literature discussions of undergraduate and graduate students across five academic semesters, the author found that texts written by…

This "Rejoinder" responds to criticisms made by Simon Hussain (2011) about the construction and operation of the "Association of Business Schools' (ABS) Academic Journal Quality Guide". In this paper the broad purposes of journal lists and guides are outlined before an account is given of the long history and multiple forms of…