Education Commons^™

Music And Medicine, Thomas Zink

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Music therapy is not a new concept, although its acceptance by the medical community as a clinical modality is just beginning to grow. This newfound acceptance is the result of recently emerging empirical evidence supporting the efficacy of music in a range of applications. Using music to aid learning, either in recovery from brain damage or to overcome neurological disorders is widely accepted. For instance, music has been used to help patients learn to speak after traumatic brain injury (Schlaug, 2009). Much of these music learning programs are based off the Tomatis method that uses specifically adapted music tracks to …

(Re)Sequencing The Research/Writing Process In The Writing Classroom, Megan Spiegel, Lee Olsen, Suzanne Paola

Writing Research Fellows

What are the outcomes of sequencing writing assignments so that students are introduced to primary sources and allowed to browse these sources prior to selecting a research topic? (This as opposed to the standard sequence by which instructors ask students to choose a topic before completing any sort of preliminary research in source material.)

Telling Stories In A Professional And Technical Writing Course, Jeremy Cushman, Kaitlyn Teer

Writing Research Fellows

Because students, arguably, entered this 400-level Professional and Technical Writing (PTW) course with some already established ideas and expectations, it was our best chance at addressing our overriding concern that students continue to approach PTW as a mere conduit for communicating knowledge made elsewhere. So if, in fact, our own assumptions about these students were legitimate, the course allowed us to begin exploring the impact storytelling research may have in an advanced PTW course. Consequently, we worked from these two guiding questions:

• What changes, if any, occur in the ways students approach Professional and Technical Writing (PTW) in terms of …

It’S All About That Base: Persuading Learners Of Spanish As A Second Language That Verb Acquisition Is The Essence Of Communication, Sean Dwyer

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

The intended result of a series of Spanish courses is the ability to speak fluidly, if not extensively, in Spanish. The quickest way to speak quickly is to learn some set phrases. As a result of strategies that involve this learning tool, perhaps 75% of Americans can parrot “¿Dónde está el baño?” and “Dos cervezas, por favor.” However, a disappointingly high percentage of people who can say those things cannot say anything that would be useful outside a restaurant.

Working backwards from my curricular goal of creating verbal facility in my students, I start by expressing the threshold concept that …