Sean Kelly

An Event History Analysis of Teacher Attrition: Salary, Teacher Tracking, and Socially Disadvantaged Schools

In this event history analysis of the 1990-1991 Schools and Staffing Survey and the 1992 Teacher Follow-up Survey, a retrospective person-year database was constructed to examine teacher attrition over the course of the teaching career. Consistent with prior research, higher teacher salaries reduced attrition, but only slightly so. Teacher attrition was no higher in socially disadvantaged schools, but poor behavioral climates did lead to greater attrition. Despite strong evidence on the effects of teacher tracking on satisfaction and efficacy, there was no evidence of higher rates of attrition among teachers who taught predominantly low-track classes. In general, school- and district-level effects were much weaker than individual-level effects.

The Contours of Tracking in North Carolina

In this analysis of North Carolina high schools the author examines school tracking policies using an amended version of Sorensens (1970) conceptualization of the organizational dimensions of tracking. Data from curriculum guides in a stratified sample of 92 high schools reveal both consistency and variation in how tracking is implemented at the school level. Understanding the policies that promote inclusive course taking, or that affect other dimensions of tracking, such electivity and scope, is the first step to improving the implementation of tracking. Research on tracking will continue to be disconnected from school improvement efforts until the relationships between school policies, the organizational dimensions of tracking, and outcomes for students are understood.

Oral Narrative Genres as Dialogic Resources for Classroom Literature Study: A Contextualized Case Study of Conversational Narrative Discussion

Five questions guided a case study exploring the relationship between oral narrative and discussion in middle school literature study: (a) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how can overall literature instruction be characterized? (b) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how well do students achieve in the focal classroom? (c) What, if any, are the links between oral narrative and discussion? (d) If discussion and narrative co-occur, what sorts of oral narratives do narrators tell in discussions? and (e) If discussion and narrative co-occur, how can we characterize the overlap in terms of interaction? In the frequent conversational narrative discussions, where oral narrative and discussion discourse overlapped, teacher and students used various kinds of oral narrative genres to prime, sustain, ratify, and amplify discussion.

Social identity theories and educational engagement

There is a large body of research in studies of schooling, particularly ethnographic case studies, which posits that collective action among students undermines engagement in school and contributes to educational inequality. In this paper I review studies of engagement from a social identity theory perspective. To what extent can collective action explain why some student groups are less engaged than others? I discuss four approaches to identifying social identity‐related problems of engagement frequently used in prior research. While researchers often find problems of engagement among low‐academic‐status students, research on educational engagement has had difficulty locating the underlying causes of inequality in student engagement. Social identity theories of educational engagement are inherently theories of collective action. I conclude that a fifth approach, large‐scale observational studies of monitoring and sanctioning, provides the best framework for identifying both the prevalence of, and solutions to, this particular source of disengagement.

Overcoming the Volatility in School-Level Gain Scores: A New Approach to Identifying Value Added With Cross-Sectional Data

Traditionally, state accountability systems have measured school-level achievement gains using cross-sectional data, for example, by comparing scores of one year’s eighth graders to scores of the next year’s eighth graders. This approach produces extremely volatile estimates of value added from year to year. This volatility suggests that the traditional use of cross-sectional data cannot reliably estimate the production of achievement by schools, and therefore schools may be unfairly sanctioned under such a system. In this analysis, the authors consider an alternative use of cross-sectional data, identifying differences in relative subject matter performance within schools. They illustrate this approach using data on public middle schools in Wisconsin during the years 1998 to 2001. Compared to school-level gain scores, relative subject matter performance is much more stable from year to year. The authors conclude that in lieu of more reliable measures of value added, state educational agencies should consider alternative uses of standardized test data.

The Correlates of Tracking Policy: Opportunity Hoarding, Status Competition, or a Technical-Functional Explanation?

In this analysis, the authors explore the relationship between the social context of high schools and school-to-school variation in tracking policies. The authors consider three explanations for the implementation of highly elaborated tracking systems: opportunity hoarding, status competition, and a technical-functional explanation. Building on the research methodology developed by Kelly, they conducted a content analysis of curriculum guides in a sample of 128 high schools to identify school tracking policies. They find that compositional variables related to technical-functional concerns, and to a lesser extent, status competition, are associated with highly elaborated school tracking policies.

Using Remember the Titans to Teach Theories of Conflict Reduction

One of the benefits of using films in sociology class is the opportunity media representations give students to ‘‘experience’’ situations that are uncommon in their daily lives. In this note the authors outline research in education that demonstrates the role of imagery and experiential learning in fostering a deeper understanding of material for students. They then focus on the ability of one film (Remember the Titans) to transport students to a place they will never experience—racially charged 1971 Virginia—and to illustrate social psychological processes of conflict reduction (contact, superordinate goals, and shared identities) as well as the link between micro-interaction, social institutions, and larger patterns of social stratification. After elaborating how the authors have used the film in class, they present findings from their students that demonstrate the effectiveness of the film for enhancing student understanding.

Teacher Support and Engagement in Math and Science: Evidence from the High School Longitudinal Study

Supportive teacher-student relationships are associated with increased levels of engagement and higher levels of achievement. Yet, studies also show that higher achieving students typically receive the most encouragement. Moreover, many studies of teacher-student relationships pertain to elementary and middle school students; by the time students reach high school, interactions with specific teachers may not be salient determinants of engagement. In this study we examine the relationship between supportive relationships with teachers and engagement in high school math and science courses. Data on teacher support and engagement collected concurrently from a student’s math and science teachers allow us to examine the within-student association between supportive relationships and engagement.

Identifying Teacher Questions Using Automatic Speech Recognition in Classrooms.

We investigate automatic question detection from recordings of teacher speech collected in live classrooms. Our corpus contains audio recordings of 37 class sessions taught by 11 teachers. We automatically segment teacher speech into utterances using an amplitude envelope thresholding approach followed by filtering non-speech via automatic speech recognition (ASR). We manually code the segmented utterances as containing a teacher question or not based on an empirically-validated scheme for coding classroom discourse. We compute domain-independent natural language processing (NLP) features from transcripts generated by three ASR engines (AT&T, Bing Speech, and Azure Speech). Our teacher-independent supervised machine learning model detects questions with an overall weighted F1 score of 0.59, a 51% improvement over chance. Furthermore, the proportion of automatically-detected questions per class session strongly correlates (Pearson’s r = 0.85) with human-coded question rates. We consider our results to reflect a substantial (37%) improvement over the state-of-the-art in automatic question detection from naturalistic audio. We conclude by discussing applications of our work for teachers, researchers, and other stakeholders.

Toward an Optimal Learning Environment

In Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement (2013), David Shernoff provides a succinct and compelling framework for engaging students; an optimal learning environment is one characterized by appropriately high task challenges and expectations for mastery, combined with motivational and emotional support. In advancing this perspective, Optimal Learning Environments uses an organizing theoretical framework from positive psychology, the flow theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. For more than a decade, Shernoff and his colleagues have applied flow theory to understanding engagement in the classroom, and much of that research is summarized in Optimal Learning Environments. Although there are many points of congruence between Shernoff ’s conceptualization of engagement and existing theories in psychology, sociology, and subject matter–based instructional research, the flow-based model used by Shernoff proves to be uniquely well suited to classroom-based research. In addition, the reader will find that throughout Optimal Learning Environments, Shernoff is exceptionally attentive to, and realistic about, the way teachers approach the difficult task of engaging students in today’s competitively oriented schools. I would emphasize that for practitioners, Shernoff ’s recommendations are not a call for unsustainable, “heroic” teaching—the scenarios and realworld case studies he uses to illustrate engaging learning environments are imminently within reach of the skilled educator. I found Shernoff ’s vision of engaging instruction to be simultaneously grand and transformative, but also realistic. Shernoff conceptualizes student engagement as the simultaneous occurrence of interest, concentration, and enjoyment. As with prior frameworks (e.g., Fredericks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2004; Newmann, Wehlage, & Lamborn, 1992), it is a jointly behavioral, cognitive, and affective construct. It also has much in common with psychological understandings of internalized perceptions of competence (i.e., self-efficacy, academic self-concept) as well as achievement goal theory. A heightened state of engagement or flow occurs when tasks present the right amount of challenge: too easy and the result is boredom, too hard and the result is anxiety. Likewise, when mastery of the task itself is intrinsically meaningful to students, they are more likely to be genuinely engaged. Consequently, tests and other performance-oriented tasks tend to produce a lesser form of engagement where some amount of concentration and effort occurs, but without genuine interest or enjoyment. Where flow theory departs from related theories of motivation and engagement is in seeing engagement as fundamentally an emergent property of the day-to-day quality of experience and relationships that a student has. That is, a student becomes engaged through the gradual accumulation of flow experiences, or disengaged by learning environments that persistently elicit boredom or anxiety. Rather than see engagement in a task as being elicited by a motivational state (although not to dismiss that is certainly often the case), Shernoff places emphasis on the experience of the task itself as supported by the teacher. Early in Optimal Learning Environments, Shernoff delineates many of the larger social forces and educational policies that stack the odds against creating optimal learning environments, and summarizes just how disturbingly pervasive student disengagement is, but the flow perspective on engagement is fundamentally optimistic about educational reform. Despite constraints, there are ways that schools and teachers can promote engagement. In Chapter 5, Shernoff reviews the literature on the relationship between students’ sociodemographic background, level of achievement, and engagement. Chapter 5 dispels many popular myths about student engagement (e.g., beliefs about minority student engagement) and discusses the relationship between the achievement level a student begins the school year with and their subsequent engagement in the competitive world of schools. Shernoff balances the literature on the negative effects of a culture of competition in schools with a discussion of the positive motivational and engaging qualities of competition. Shernoff notes that some amount of competition is embedded in flow theory: competition is typically interactive, provides immediate feedback, and offers an opportunity to try to build off of one’s skills. Elsewhere in the book (p. 135), Shernoff provides a detailed example of a competitive, and highly engaging, instructional episode from his team’s research. How competition affects 532521 EDRXXX10.3102/0013189X14532521Educational ResearcherMonth XXXX research-article2014