Research indicates a need for upgrading vocabulary development in the elementary school classroom. The purpose of this project is to aid in developing the young child's vocabulary as a foundation for future reading. By means of oral presentations of the children's literature and activities centered on the vocabularies generated by these selections, students will have the opportunity to expand their store of words and meanings.

This study identifies, explains, and develops a practical model of teaching art criticism within a traditional secondary art curriculum. The approach to teaching art criticism uses the discipline-based art education format described in the Getty publication of 1985, a composite art critical format including B. Bloom, E. Feldman, K. Hamblen, and E. Kaelin, is accomplished through a process model curriculum developed by L. Stenhouse, and uses K. Gentle's curriculum design as the basis of the Curriculum Model Diagram. The project provides lessons that are intended to help junior high school, and senior high school art students develop the necessary skills to make informed judgements about art in the production, historic, aesthetic, and critical areas of the existing art curriculum. The methodology is presented in a lesson plan design, includes a Biographical Sketch, and a Six-Part Questioning Strategy. Three experienced artist/teachers were asked to review the curriculum and, using the Artist/Educator Questionnaire, evaluate it. Feedback from the three reviewers suggested several ways the curriculum could be tailored to individual teacher and program needs.

The relationship between peer-editing and composition quality was investigated. The thirty subjects involved were 11th-grade English students randomly assigned to control and experimental groups. During a nine week period, both groups received the same assignments and teacher evaluation. The control group, which did not revise unless upon individual initiative, participated in a dramatics workshop while the experimental group used a worksheet developed by Leila Christenbury (1982) to edit and proofread each other's writing before evaluation by the teacher. Pre and post writing assignments were blind rated at the end of the experiment using the Diederich Rating Scale. Individual item scores and total scores were compared. The t-ratios proved insignificant at the .05 level. Positive student feedback, however, indicated that the procedure deserves further investigation.

This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of the language experience approach (LEA) for teaching reading and writing skills to functionally illiterate high school students who were identified as learning disabled. Twenty-one 9th-grade students ages fifteen to sixteen participated. The students were divided into a control group and an experimental group. The control group was instructed through the use of a commercial reading kit, Reader's Workshop I (1974). The experimental group received instruction using the LEA which uses student written material to generate reading skill activities. To verify effectiveness of the LEA, pre- and posttests of the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test (1976), or SDRT, brown level, forms A and B and the Sentence Writing Strategy Pretest (1985), or SWSP, were administered to both the control and experimental groups. The results on the subtests of the SDRT indicated no significant gains or losses of reading skill ability for either group. The SWSP though, indicated a significant gain in sentence writing ability of 29 percentage points for the experimental group while the control group lost 11 percentage points. It is therefore evident that the language experience approach can be successful for teaching reading and writing skills to functionally illiterate high school students because it integrates reading and writing rather than providing detached skill instruction.

Learning to write their own words increases students' success in learning to read, provides practice in thinking skills, increases their self-concept and provides early positive attitudes about writing. However, most writing done in first grade classrooms today consists mainly of copying from the blackboard. This is a tedious and boring task for first graders, and gives them bad attitudes about writing as they begin their school careers. Many teachers don't require young students to write their own words because of the students' inability to spell words and form grammatically correct sentences. However, if a teacher is accepting of the students' imperfect spelling and grammar, the students will feel free to express their thoughts on paper. This project provides a year long curriculum design along with the activities necessary to teach first grade students to write creatively.

The curriculum developed in this project was designed to meet the requirements of the Clay County gifted program. It provides a comprehensive American history curriculum, discovery through the Civil War, to promote mastery of the content area, increase involvement and interest of students in learning through the reduction of irrelevant and redundant material, and encourage individual initiative for one/sown investigations. The program consists of a series of independent studies in which the teacher is a facilitator who sets the stage and encourages students' endeavors. The study units developed for this project include objectives representing all levels in Bloom/s Taxonomy. The curriculum was evaluated by pilot-testing and surveying the students involved, as well as by surveying a team of teachers of the gifted and a university faculty member in social studies education.