Search results

This paper aims to present the finding of a practical lab assessment used to evaluate students’ mastery of Ohm’s law. The researchers used an approach combining different instruction types and lab formats to examine whether this combination produced a unique effect on students’ performance. This multifaceted approach provided evidence about how assessment design could affect students’ lab performance. The study also discussed various strategies that could guide instructors and curriculum designers about how to incorporate lab tasks into their curriculum to facilitate students’ mastery of subject content.

This study was a quantitative experiment that used a factorial repeated measures design. The design allowed the researchers to measure participants’ task scores and time across different treatment conditions, hence enabling the effects of lab format and instructional type to be observed. All participants were recruited through the convenience sampling strategy.

The results suggested that there was a statistically significant difference in the time taken to complete the task. However, no statistically significant difference was recorded in the participants’ task scores. Overall, it appeared that participants performed better in the simulation-based labs with expository instructions.

The current study contributes to the body of knowledge on the effect of lab format and instructional type on students’ performance in lab-based assessments. The results presented here may also help instructors to determine the most appropriate form of lab formats and instruction types to be used in an electronics course.

To facilitate teacher–researcher collaboration in order to implement an informational writing research project using the framework of Browse, Collect, Collate, and Compose embedded within the writing workshop.

This study was conducted using a qualitative (Merriam, 1998) method of inquiry, more specifically, case study research design. A researcher and a practitioner came together to explore problems related to authentic use of expository genre and collaborated to help fourth graders write informational books.

The development of an authentic informational book was in contrast to the inauthentic purposes whereby students studied expository writing as preparation for statewide testing of student writing achievement. The study advocates the usage of authentic literacy contexts where students can enjoy writing for personal purposes.

Collaboration between classroom teachers of writing and researchers contributes to the theoretical and practical knowledge base of the teacher and researcher. Overall literacy development is enhanced when students read and write out of their own interest. Students use trade books as mentor texts to compose and create their informational books. The value of seeing fourth graders as researchers and making an informational book serves the authentic purpose of writing.

This content analysis examines the historical representation of Margaret Sanger within trade books. From the framework of the historiography, this paper unpacks how common curricular resources depict an American icon with a complicated past.

In this paper, the author conducted a content analysis of biographies and expository compilations featuring Sanger. The entire data pool were sampled and analyzed.

The trade books, particularly the biographies, historically represented Sanger in most categories. Sanger's international direct action and eugenics were two misrepresented areas. Expository compilations, with more limited space than biographies, contained more omissions and minimized or vague depictions of key areas. Findings did not appear dependent upon date of publication.

This study explores an icon of America's free speech battles and birth control rights at a time when culture wars are shaping current events. No researchers have previously explored Sanger's historical representation within trade books.

Purpose – The primary purpose of this chapter is to offer classroom teachers, administrators, and program specialists specific “big picture” strategies to support upper grade English learners in comprehending expository content-area texts that offer challenges not present in narrative or story-like texts.Design/methodology/approach – Two separate approaches for helping English learners to identify content topics, text structures, and key ideas that control text selections are described and modeled: the Advance Organizer and PLAN (Predict, Locate, Add, and Note).Findings – When learners engage in specific, step-by-step “big picture” processes to understand text structure, organization, and concepts/vocabulary (not relying simply on decoding, or sounding out words), they attain higher levels of comprehension and retention.Research limitations/implications – “Big picture” strategies are well-documented in research as having advantages for all learners who interact with expository text structures – but are especially effective for English learners who may struggle with unfamiliar text structures and higher levels of academic and technical content-area vocabulary.Practical implications – Specific directions for (and advantages of) implementing two big picture strategies that are adaptable to a wide range of grade levels and content-area topics are presented. Teachers can easily modify the strategies in flexible ways to personalize the use of these strategies for English learners in any content-area context.Originality/value of chapter – With step-by-step directions, templates, and examples of content-area texts to guide them, teachers can easily utilize these strategies with English learners using a whole class, small-group, or one-to-one intervention approach.

Reading comprehension is a critical area of instruction for all students, but particularly for students with learning disabilities (LD) that impede their ability to understand what they read. This synthesis includes 30 intervention studies on reading comprehension for students with LD conducted in several countries and all regions of the United States. Specifically, the current review focuses on the efficacy of these strategies across grade levels, with various types of reading materials, and in conjunction with other instructional components that have potential to enhance instructional benefits to students. Results suggest that reading comprehension instruction is effective for improving the skills of this population.

Courses in taxation generally cover elements pertaining to the quantitative, legal and expository aspects, all of which rely on the understanding and interpretation of complex tax statutes, which in turn involve both language and content complexities. This study is on students pursuing taxation courses at the tertiary level in Malaysia, where the medium of instruction is in English, which is neither the students’ mother tongue nor their first language. As tax statutes and reference materials on taxation in Malaysia are mainly in English, and taxation courses are taught and assessed in English, a reasonably high level of English language skills is essential to cope with the legal and expository aspects. The study reveals that a majority of the students agreed that they encountered difficulties in terms of language complexity rather than content complexity, particularly in relation to understanding textbooks and examination questions. In terms of content complexity, less than one third agreed that they encountered difficulties in understanding textbooks and lectures/tutorials.

Analyses attempts already made to evaluate the qualities required in a successful salesperson. Investigates whether salespeople differ according to the type of product they sell, relating personality characteristics to selling skills. Describes three selling skills: propagatory, expository and closing, and reveals that different selling situations involve different proportions of these skills. Discusses the need for social skill training.

Social justice themes permeate the social studies, history, civics, and current events curricula. The purpose of this paper is to examine how non-fiction trade books represented lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals and issues.

Trade books published after 2000 and intended for middle grades (5-8) and high school (9-12) students were analyzed.

Findings included main characters’ demography, sexuality, and various ancillary elements, such as connection to LGBTQ community, interactions with non-LGBTQ individuals, the challenges and contested terrain that LGBTQ individuals must traverse, and a range of responses to these challenges. Publication date, intended audience, and subgenre of non-fiction – specifically, memoir, expository, and historical text – added nuance to findings. Viewed broadly, the books generally engaged in exceptionalism, a historical misrepresentation, of one singular character who was a gay or lesbian white American. Diverse sexualities, races, ethnicities, and contexts were largely absent. Complex resistance structures were frequent and detailed.

This research contributes to previous scholarship exploring LGBTQ-themed fiction for secondary students and close readings of secondary level non-fiction trade books.

Literacy demands have changed over the years and for success in society it is necessary to handle a wide range of texts and written information. The school has been criticized for not giving their pupils the necessary abilities to handle the kind of information they are faced with in society. One important dimension of literacy is reading comprehension, but even though much written information has the form of tables, drawings, graphs, etc. such presentations are most often accompanied by written text. This chapter focuses the comprehension of different kinds of written information, and data from different tasks are evaluated in light of the simple view of reading. A total of 132 grade 6 readers were given four reading comprehension tasks concurrently with a decoding task and a listening comprehension task. It was found that the sum of decoding and listening comprehension accounted for a larger part of the variance in all the reading comprehension tasks than the product of decoding and listening comprehension. The pupils' results on a naming task and morphological tasks from preschool accounted for significant parts of the variance in the comprehension of both plain text and text combined with tables and graphs over and above the concurrent decoding and listening comprehension results. Speed of orthographic identification in 2nd grade accounted for an additional, significant part of the variance in the plain text reading tasks. These results show that processing speed and linguistic knowledge, such as morphological knowledge, are important contributors to the comprehension of different kinds of written information. Even if speed of orthographic identification is especially important for comprehending plain texts, a broad linguistic and cognitive perspective seems to be important when preparing pupils to comprehend different kinds of written material.

Writing is an act of expressive communication achieved through the medium of print. It is but one of three modes of linguistic communication. The other expressive mode is speaking, while listening and reading comprise the two receptive modes. The purpose of this chapter is to present the impact of a study in which students read and discussed expository poetry. Then they exchanged ideas relating to scientific concepts in the poems with students in a different group via pen pal letters. We analyzed these pen pal letters over four weeks to determine the influence of writing opportunities in an atmosphere rich in all four aspects of linguistic communication, involving authentic communication between students and within a community of learners.

Six of Brod Bagert’s unpublished poems concerned with science concepts were read by students in Collaborative Discover Groups (CDG) in two third-grade classes. After the groups discussed the poems, a mini-lesson on one of the Six Traits of Writing followed, and the students responded individually to a teacher-generated prompt related to the specific poem. The responses were in the form of pen pal letters to students in another class who had just read the same poem, received the same teacher-directed mini-lesson, and had had a similar discussion in their respective CDG. The data gleaned from these letters provide information demonstrating the effect of emphasizing all linguistic facets synergistically in a social, communicative setting. Both the processes and the findings will be discussed.

Analysis of the pen pal letters third-grade students wrote over four weeks showed the following patterns. (1) There was an increase in the discursive nature of the writing. (2) The incidence of rhetorical questioning, using A + B = C reasoning, and evaluative thinking was present in the fifth set of letters, and not in the first. Additionally, the number of sentences per letter increased from the first to the fifth, and the number of words per letter increased from approximately 50 words per letter to 75 words per letter. It appears that the linguistically synergistic communicative processes employed in this study are reflected in the increased sophistication and communicative nature of these writings.

The data revealed the importance of including the sociocultural tenants in the classroom, emphasizing that reading, writing, speaking, and listening are all a part of the same phenomenon. Together they strengthen and support each other.