All of us involved in writing centers (indeed, all of us in education) must recognize that the educational community of the 1990s will continue to grow more diverse culturally, linguistically, scholastically.Given this diversity, students, teachers, and tutors will become more, not less, interdependent.The ready, predictable answers and assumptions that existed once in a monocultural classroom or university don't exist anymore."Success" will not be meted out by one authoritative figure, but will be measured by the mutual nature of the success, hinging on the degree to which all members of this threesome of tutor, student, and teacher can become what Paulo Freire calls the "subjects" of their own learning process.Our hopes for these redefined social relationships in the writing center carry with them hopes for a redefined sense of academic literacy as well.Multicultural student populations will not only change social relationships but challenge monolithic conceptions of academic literacy.We will need to seek out views of student literacy that will emphasize interdependence, such as the ones articulated in David Bleich's The Double Perspective , Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman's

Writing centers are sites around which folklore circulates.Staff meetings, classrooms, newsletters, and journals are filled with tales of individual and collective actualization, celebrating one-to-one teaching as deeply social, collaborative, and empowering.Legends from the writing center also speak to the tensions inherent in the spaces, reflecting divisions of tutoring as prescriptive versus directive, banking versus dialogic, and peer-driven versus expertowned.Following their review of writing center theory, history, and practice, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner advise, "What is most important is to understand where our practices come from and to unravel the various influences on those practices" (154).Knowing these conditions of possibility makes for more effective tutoring, and this awareness also speaks to a politics about learning and the production of writers.Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills -building and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-50).For each domain, the tutorial and the social actors in and surrounding it are implicated in a certain identity politics.In the storehouse writing center, skill-building and knowledge transmission posit the writer as a vessel in need of filling, and identity becomes conferred as a sort of membership card or rite of passage.In the generative writing center, the writer emerges from social interaction, and identity becomes a negotiation of assimilation, separation, and subversion.In the critical/activist writing center, consciousness-raising produces writers aware of the constellation

This article examines ways in which the fundamentals of both writing studies and sustainability studies overlap and complement each other, ultimately moving toward a theory of writing that not only is sustainable, but that also sustains writing practice across a variety of areas. For example, in order to be sustainable, both writing and geographical communities must consider several elements in any decision or employed strategy. Both writing (the act and the teaching of it) and sustainability studies are localized, regionally specific. Key to the argument’s theoretical positioning is the role of technology and technological innovation in both a community and a classroom in terms of inhibiting and facilitating sustainability and communication.

With a particular focus on the preparation of teaching assistants, this profile details the recent transition to a standardized English 101 curriculum at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). More specifically, the profile details theoretical and practical incentives for the move, as well as political and logistical challenges encountered by Writing Studies staff in conceiving and implementing the new curriculum. The profile ends with a discussion of the perceived benefits of standardizing English 101 at SIUC and, presumably, by extension, in the context of similar institutional contexts.

I created my Exploratory Survey on the Status of the Research Paper Assignment in First-year Writing/Composition Courses to learn whether the traditional research paper remained as common an assignment in 2009 as it had been in the past. My survey updates results from two previous surveys on the status of this assignment. Ambrose N. Manning’s survey, conducted in 1961, found that 83% of colleges and universities in the United States included the traditional research paper assignment in first-year writing/composition curricula. James E. Ford and Dennis R. Perry’s 1982 survey concluded that 78.11% of the colleges and universities that required first-year writing/composition courses included the assignment, a decline of 5%. My survey results indicate that in 2009, at survey respondents’ schools, only 6% of research assignments in first-year writing/composition courses are traditional research paper assignments, a decline of 72% since 1982, while 94% are alternative ones. This shift appears to reflect trends in scholarship as well as changes in assessment practices, structure of first-year writing/composition programs, and technologies for writing, researching, and teaching.

In this interview Susan Jarratt reviews the trajectory of her scholarship and revisits some of the lessons learned from a variety of her projects while simultaneously drawing out historical and narrative continuities of seemingly disparate time periods and contexts. In doing so, she elucidates the value of scholarship as a political and instructive tool that can be usefully applied to both teaching and administration.

The essay discusses a thematic approach to teaching the first half of the American literature survey, focusing on race, whiteness, and class.

This article establishes reasons for teaching metaphorical thinking and then goes on to argue that Angela Carter’s short fiction is uniquely suited for such an endeavor.

Kinsey McKinney responds to “The messy Teaching Conversation.”

Reviewed are: Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life Edited by Sean P. Murphy, Reviewed by Lois Birky Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being by Deborah Dean, Reviewed by Meredith DeCosta Ideas That Work in College Teaching, Edited by Robert L. Badger, Reviewed by Raymond Bergeron Inside the Community College Writing Center: Ten Guiding Principles by Ellen G. Mohr, Reviewed by Deborah Bertsch Essential Literary Terms: A Brief Norton Guide with Exercises by Sharon Hamilton, Reviewed by John Benson

This essay argues that only by sharing our mistakes and uncertainty can we fully reflect on our own process as teachers, only by understanding our process can we begin to identify the many factors that contribute to classroom messes in the first place, and only by acknowledging the perpetual messiness of our practice can we fully engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

As they prepare to teach writing, new teachers should respond to writing assignments that we deliberately design to be difficult, exploratory, or critically reflective, so that they may better develop flexibility and engagement as learners, teachers, and theorists in the field of writing instruction.

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

The world of knowledge about the book is seemingly inexhaustible, and part of the quest is an endless pursuit of information about the artifact itself.

Recent appeal to the concept of design in composition studies benefits teaching writing in digital media. Yet the concept of design has not been developed enough to fully benefit composition instruction. This article develops an understanding of design as a matter of resolving wicked problems and makes a case for the advantages of this understanding in composition studies.

While internationalization has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different in their approaches or rhetorics, appear to lack what we have; and how we might avoid colonialist intervention or offer consultation. These import/export focal points create key blind spots in our awareness of deep and rich writing research and programming traditions internationally, of how we fit—or do not fit—into this broader world, and of missed opportunities for self-reflection and growth.

Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities we’ve found most reliable in producing B-quality writing over fourteen weeks. Higher grades are awarded to students who produce exemplary portfolios. Thus we freely give students lots of evaluative feedback on their writing, but students can count on a course grade of B if they do all the required activities—no matter our feedback. Our goal in using contracts is to enable teachers and students to give as much attention as possible to writing and as little as possible to grades.

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

In this article we provide a “portrait” of an exemplary writing teacher and the social construction of authority he established with students in two courses. The portrait demonstrates that teacher authority is most essentially a form of professional authority granted by students who affirm the teacher’s expertise, self-confidence, and belief in the importance of his or her work. We find that professional authority is neither oppressive nor incompatible with de-centered methods, effective instruction, or the kind of assertive teacher authority required to effectively lead a class. In this way, effective instruction and teacher authority become mutually reinforcing reciprocal processes.

The aim of this study was primarily to investigate the effects of morphological strategies training on students with and without spelling difficulties in English as a foreign language (EFL), but also to assess the feasibility of morphological strategies training in a classroom context. The intervention was piloted in the sixth grade of a Greek primary school: 23 Greek-speaking students, aged 11-12, were assigned to the treatment group receiving explicit teaching on inflectional and derivational morphemic patterns of English words. The control group, composed of 25 Greek-speaking students of the same age, attending a different classroom of the same school, was taught English spelling in a conventional (visual-memory based) way. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed to gain insights: a pre- and post-test, an observation schedule, a student questionnaire and a teacher interview. The pre- and post-test results indicated that the metamorphological training yielded specific effects on targeted morpheme patterns. The same results were obtained from a sub-group of nine poor spellers in the treatment group, compared to a sub-group of six poor spellers in the control one. The observation data revealed that the metamorphological training promoted students' active participation and the questionnaire data indicated that students got satisfaction from their training. Finally, interview data highlighted that teachers considered the intervention as a feasible way of improving students' morphological processing skills in spelling.

The ethics and efficacy of explicitly teaching disciplinary discourse conventions to undergraduate students has been hotly debated. This quasi-experimental study seeks to contribute to these debates by focusing on the conventional special topoi of literary analysis”conventions that previous Writing in the Disciplines (WID) research indicates are customarily tacitly imparted to literature students. We compare student writing and questionnaires from seven sections of Writing about Literature providing explicit instruction in these disciplinary conventions to those from nine sections taught using traditional methods. We examine whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions helps students produce rhetorically effective discourse, whether English professors prefer student discourse that uses these conventions, and whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions hampers student expression, enjoyment, and engagement. Five English professors who rated the student essays gave higher ratings to essays that engaged the special topoi of their discipline. Furthermore, they significantly preferred the essays written by students who had received explicit instruction in these topoi. Meanwhile, students who received explicit instruction in the special topoi of literary analysis indicated comparable, often higher levels, of engagement, enjoyment, and perceived opportunities for self-expression to those students who experienced the course’s traditional pedagogy. These findings suggest several implications for WID instruction and research relating to student and faculty professionalization in higher education.

The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Martha Bigelow, Martine Braaksma, Deborah Dillon, Jessie Dockter, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Tanja Janssen, Karen Jorgensen, Richa Kapoor, Lauren Liang, Bic Ngo, David O’Brien, Mistilina Sato, and Cassie Scharber.

Reviewed are Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged University by Ann Feldman; City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America by David Fleming; and Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World by Nancy Welch.

This essay uses Jessica Benjamin's concept of intersubjectivity to consider a third space in the classroom, outside the teacher-centered or student-centered polarity. The intersubjective third space is characterized by the interplay of inner fantasy and recognition of otherness, and it is distinguished, above all, by the tension of paradox.

This article extends a conversation about teaching begun by Michael Bérubé. Prompted by Bérubé's assertion that his publishing experience translates to better responses to student writing, the piece argues that professors can teach beyond what Bérubé calls “the six” by scaffolding student writing.

This article documents a scholarship of teaching and learning project designed to help literature students cultivate the core disciplinary skill of reading for complexity. We offer a close reading of student responses from a collaboratively designed lesson to understand what happens when students read complex texts in introductory literature courses.

This essay explores strategies for teaching texts that are critical of an untempered pursuit of wealth to business students, although many of these students have chosen their course of study based on their internalization and privileging of capitalist discourse. Karl Marx's “Estranged Labour,” Charles Dickens's Hard Times, and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech by Muhammad Yunus can be used in the classroom to encourage students to broaden their understanding of wealth, power, and class and to suggest that they, in their professional lives, may be agents of social change. Pedagogical strategies employed in this first-year course include giving students responsibility for the direction of class discussions, so that their specific interests and agendas receive attention, and requiring that students personalize these texts that may seem distant to them by exploring their own experiences in the world of work and commerce in the context of the readings. By the end of the semester, the binary structure of their worldview has been challenged and, ideally, complicated.

In assigning her university memoir-writing class to locate documents of significance to their lives as a starting point for composing personal essays, this teacher compelled her students to search outside themselves for material—in effect, to undertake research in a genre that many initially approach as if the story is already there, complete, inside their heads. By immersing themselves in material that was personal but also concrete and exterior, students discovered that memoir writing calls for as much exploration outside the self as searching within. As it turned out, the assignment not only helped to clarify the role of research in memoir writing, it also served as a springboard for discussions on the nature of documents and on their various uses in conveying a personal story.

Rensselaer’s Technical Writers’ Institute, the first program of its kind, had a profound impact on technical communication. It enabled technical communicators without formal education in the field to gain important knowledge, provided a forum for communicators from different industries to meet in order to solve mutual problems, played a key role in defining the field and its needs, encouraged recruitment (including the hiring of more women), promoted professional societies and formal degree programs, and seriously affected industry training programs by enabling them to use institute teaching materials. Knowledge gained through the Technical Writers’ Institute enabled Rensselaer to develop many other innovations.

Technical and professional writing pedagogies have traditionally understood collaborative writing as an aggregate, cooperative venture between writers and subject matter experts. In contrast, this tutorial argues that Web 2.0 technologies offer technical and professional communication pedagogies more advantageous conceptions and practices of collaborative writing. The tutorial analyzes how new media technologies create a different collaborative writing environment and then discusses how these environments help collaborative writing methods create an alternative writing situation. The study concludes by examining the outcomes of student Web 2.0 research projects and by offering technical and professional writing instructors new pedagogical strategies for teaching collaborative writing.

Reviews Serena Zweimüller, Lukian, “Rhetorum praeceptor": Einleitung, Text und Kommentar (- Hypomnemata, 176). Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. 499 pp. ISBN 3-525-25284-6. Numerous publications on the history of rhetoric deal with their subject either in its totality or in certain cultural periods such as classical Antiquity or the Renaissance. By contrast the history of antirhetoric remains a yet unwrit­ ten desideratum. In spite of its title Samuel Ijsseling's monograph Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (1976) provides only sporadic glimpses of this his­ tory which begins with Plato and the Sophists, reaches as far as Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, and extends well into the twentieth century. It always, however, emerges in the context of philosophy, especially idealis­ tic philosophy, and later in the context of German Geistesgeschichte. These contexts have so far been the focus of existing studies of antirhetoric. Com­ pared with antirhetorical philosophers, Lucian of Samosata (b. ca. 120 AD), prominent representative of the so-called Second Sophistic Age, has been ne­ glected as a member in the chain of antirhetoricians. First "a pleader (Suidas) and later a travelling lecturer who practised the art of Sophistic rhetoric as far as afield as Gaul" (Oxford Classical Dictionary), Lucian, notorious as an eiron from other works, also displayed enough self-irony as to satirize the new Sophistic fashion in oratory. He engages in this (Menippean) satire in a piece entitled ΡΗΤΟΡΩΝ ΔΙΔΑΣΚΑΛΟΣ (in Latin: Rhetorum praeceptor; in English literally Teacher of Rhetoricians), which is rendered in English by A. M. Harmon in the fourth volume of his Loeb edition of Lucian's works (pp. 133-71) as Λ Professor of Public Speaking. Because no further edition with translation appeared after the one by Harmon, there was an editorial lacuna as well as one of scholarly criticism. Both lacunae have now been filled by the book of Serena Zweimuller, which originated as a 2007 Swiss doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich. The content of the voluminous work is divided into six parts: 1. an introduction to the rhetorical and literary fashioning of the treatise together with an examination of its philosophical and comical elements on the basis of subtexts and analogous texts; 2. a short summary and structural-rhetorical analysis of Rhetorum praeceptor; 3. an outline of the level of education and the culture of oratorical performance in the age of the Second Sophistic; 4. on Rhetorica, Vol. XXVII, Issue 4, pp. 446-456, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2009 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions w ebsite, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.200A27.4.44b. Reviews 447 pseudo-philosophers and ideal representatives of philosophy, together with parallels in Lucian s motifs of mockery; 5. text and translation; commentary; 6. the reception of Lucian's Rhetorum praeceptor by Willibald Pirckheimer and Desiderius Erasmus in the Renaissance. The Greek text is based on the Oxford edition of M. D. Macleod (Luciani opera. Tomus II (1974, reprinted 1993)), with a few different readings of certain textual variants that are indicated in the apparatus cnticus. As for the editor's German translation, not a single word is devoted to this topic, though the historical translation by the German classicist poet Christoph Martin Wieland (reprinted in the three-volume edition of Jurgen Werner (1981)) would have deserved one. The commentary elucidates both linguistic problems and the historical background of the text. This is often done with reference to the available research literature, as is evident, for instance, in the explanations of the important terms rhetor and sophistes on pp. 172-74. Here the point is justly emphasized that in the period of imperial rule the term sophistes by no means always carried negative connotations, though it could for the purpose of denigrating an opponent. This would, however, have been the right place to insert a digression on the Second Sophistic, since there is no introductory chapter where such a presentation would have been appropriate. Here the author could have made use of valuable studies on the history...

A happy coincidence exists between the elements needed to analyze, understand, and produce strong arguments and their analog properties entailed in the map metaphor that we use as prototype in our teaching.

This essay describes the results of a scholarship of teaching and learning project examining the transition of underprepared first-year writers at an open admission institution as they struggled to translate their first-semester instruction into second-semester success.

Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers, Edited by Peter Vandenberg, Sue Hum, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon, reviewed by Jeffrey Klausman Writing-Intensive: Becoming W-Faculty in a New Writing Curriculum, by Wendy Strachan, reviewed by Abigail L. Montgomery Writing Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching, Edited by Joy Reid, reviewed by Todd Ruecker

Reviewed is Teaching with Life Writing Texts, edited by Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes.

As writing-program administrators and faculty are being called upon more frequently to help design and facilitate large-scale assessments, it becomes increasingly important for us to see assessment as integral to our work as academics. This article provides a framework, based on current historical, theoretical, and rhetorical knowledge, to help writing specialists understand how to embrace assessment as a powerful mechanism for improved teaching and learning at their institutions.

This article argues that the teaching of public writing should not neglect issues of circulation and local need. In a series of case studies involving small press papers and homeless advocacy, the authors seek to extend recent work begun by Susan Wells, John Trimbur, and Nancy Welch, which raises crucial questions about public rhetoric in the writing classroom.

With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.

This article describes an interdisciplinary professional writing program and its benefits for students (in terms of knowledge, habits of mind, and developing careers). The authors present qualitative research findings about habits of mind and knowledge domains of successful students, which may prove valuable for faculty teaching in similar programs as they consider curriculum design, or for faculty pondering issues of career development for master’s degree graduates.

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David E. Kirkland argues that our understanding of literate practice in relation to space needs to be radically reworked to account for new digital dimensions that are dispersed, discontinuous, and yet deeply woven into everyday and institutional worlds. His account highlights the way these digital spaces pepper the official landscape of schooling, fracturing the dominance of official discourse as students’ diverse linguistic, literate, and semiotic practices infuse this complex composite space.

This study explored how voice developed in the English writing of 57 Chinese teachers of English who participated in a three-week writing workshop during a summer institute in a large, urban school district in southeastern China. Teachers from grades 3 through 12 wrote daily in English in a workshop environment. Primary data sources were pre- and post-workshop writing samples. Supporting data included various teacher writings completed in the course of the workshop, daily written reflections, a final essay exam, anonymous course evaluations, and biographical and professional surveys. The pre- and post-workshop writing samples were assessed using the 6 + 1 Trait® analytical model of scoring writing (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 2006). Scoring showed that the teachers’ writing improved significantly in the course of the institute, but the greatest gain was made in the trait of “voice””the distinctive, individual way in which a writer speaks to a reader. This finding will be considered in light of the current direction of educational reform in China and of current debates over the value of teaching voice in diverse writing contexts. The study had implications for the teaching of writing to English language learners and for the professional development of teachers of writing, including those who teach English as a Foreign Language.

This four-year longitudinal study examines the transitions of an early-career teacher from her completion of a graduate program with English certification (grades 7-12) into teaching literature in an urban high school. Our central question was how Beth’s pedagogical knowledge was shaped over time by her consistent efforts to enact two key principles: (1) the centrality of students’ meaning making and (2) the need to maintain high academic expectation for all students. The tensions that resulted from her department’s stances toward these principles led to consequential transitions (Beach, 1999, 2003) for Beth’s learning and development. An activity-theoretical analysis showed that over time Beth’s development was shaped by the values, experiences, and practices of other teachers in her immediate professional communities and in contexts external to the department. Rather than relying on a single activity setting, Beth’s pedagogical knowledge and practices developed out of an interweaving of conceptual and practical tools based on the constructivist principles of her teacher education program, her deepening knowledge of English studies, her students’ learning, her enactment of new teaching practices, and her involvement in this longitudinal research project. This study raises questions regarding stage theories of teacher learning and development, suggests a horizontal notion of teacher development grounded in sociocultural theory, and provides evidence for the positive and lasting effects of teacher education and reflective practice.

This study examines discussions of model papers in a high school Advanced Placement English classroom where students were preparing for a high-stakes writing assessment. Much of the current research on talk about writing in various contexts such as classroom discourse, teacher-student writing conferences, and peer tutoring has emphasized the social and constructive nature of instructional discourse. Building on this work, the present study explored how talk about writing also takes on a performative function, as speakers accent or point to the features of the context that are most significant ideologically. Informed by perspectives on the emergent and mediated nature of discourse, this study found that the participants used ventriloquation to voice the aspects of the essays that they considered to be most important, and that these significant chunks were often aphorisms about the test essay. The teacher frequently ventriloquated raters, while the students often ventriloquated themselves or the teacher. The significance of ventriloquation is not just that it helps to mediate the generic conventions of timed student essays; it also mediates social positioning by helping the speakers to present themselves and others in flexible ways. This study also raises questions about the ways that ventriloquation can limit the ways that students view academic writing.

The Microreview feature is intended to present a series of condensed reviews of online work by an invited scholar. By providing an informed perspective chosen by the reviewer, readers can not only find out about this type of online work, but begin to understand how the online work may be relevant to their own scholarly and teaching practices.

Many authors give advice to students about how to write the Introduction section of their articles. Some give examples of different ways of doing this in general, and a few discuss the opening sentence in particular. In this article, 13 different types of opening sentences are outlined, and their usage contrasted in British and American journals in the Sciences and Social Sciences. Implications for teaching are considered.

This essay considers an essential act of seeing that is central to the composing process—a conceptual moment when the mind acquires a notional sense of what the accumulated evidence means. Yet this necessary conceptual thing cannot actually be seen in any ordinary sense of the word. Imaginal rather than pictorial, the conception is crucial to the effective teaching of writing. Without it there is no hint of idea, no basis for a coherent argument. Without it, student writers remain blinded by the evidence.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> Information security and privacy on the internet are critical issues in our society. In this research, we examine factors that influence internet users' private-information-sharing behavior. Based on a survey of 285 preteens and early teens, who are among the most vulnerable groups on the web, this study provides a research framework that explains an internet user's information privacy protection behavior. According to our study results, internet users' information privacy behaviors are affected by two significant factors: (1) users' perceived importance of information privacy and (2) information privacy self-efficacy. The study also found that users believe in the value of online information privacy and that information privacy protection behavior varies by gender. Our findings indicate that educational opportunities regarding internet privacy and computer security as well as concerns from other reference groups (e.g., peer, teacher, and parents) play an important role in positively affecting the internet users' protective behavior regarding online privacy. </para>