Sean Kelly
Biographic Data
| ID | 3685804 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sean Kelly |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sean |
| FAMILY NAME | Kelly |
| SIGNATURE | KELLY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2415-0375 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 252 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Variation and change in high school STEM opportunity to learn in the US
I Want to Believe
This paper considers the current surge of interest in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) through a Jungian psychological lens. The author expresses ontological agnosticism toward the literal physical-extraterrestrial (PE) hypothesis, focusing instead on the phenomenon’s archetypal power. Confirming Jung’s assessment, the author argues that UAP sightings, often manifesting as mandala-like symbols of the Self, function as a psychological compen…
The labour market matching efficiency in Australian regions
We advance the literature on estimating job matching functions in two ways. Scholars acknowledge that past matching efficiency affects current job search and posting behaviour (i.e. tightness is endogenous); however, they so far ignore that forecast (lead) matching efficiency may also affect tightness. We specify a model that accommodates lagged and lead efficiency to address both endogeneity channels. Scholars also acknowledge that matching effi…
Making sense of political imbalance in American higher education
Exposure to Traumatic Events and Shame in Adolescent Surf Lifesavers
Emergency service personnel experience high levels of psychological distress, with increasing evidence of associations with shame and trauma. Additionally, adolescence is a critical time in social and cognitive development, in which shame plays an important role. In Australia, adolescent volunteer surf lifesavers (SLS) are particularly vulnerable due to exposure to potentially traumatic experiences (PTEs) such as rescues and resuscitation of huma…
Gardening practices in Alaska build on traditional food system foundations
Community-based food cultivation by and for rural Alaskans has never been stronger. Rural gardeners, many Indigenous, provide their families and communities with affordable access to high-quality fruits and vegetables and other locally grown foods. Despite these emerging trends, there is sparse examination of gardening as a complementary, diversification, or adaptation strategy in wild food-centered systems and the interchange of values and world…
Social Determinants of School-to-School Differences in Opportunity to Learn (OTL)
Do some students learn more than others because they attend School A instead of School B? Or is educational inequality generated elsewhere, from common processes within schools, or outside of formal schooling? Within these paradigmatic questions, this study investigates the social determinants of school-to-school differences in STEM course-taking experiences, a key component of Opportunity to Learn (OTL), in a cross-national setting. Drawing on a…
Agnosticism in instructional observation systems
Many instructional observation systems are designed to provide rough, qualitative, highly-evaluative assessments on numerous core dimensions of teaching. Such systems achieve comprehensive overviews of teaching but are poorly suited to answering many discovery-oriented research questions. In contrast, fine-grained agnostic systems are needed to pose and answer causal questions about instruction, and to fully understand instructional variation and…
Don't Call It Hair Metal
Engagement, achievement, and teacher classroom practices in mathematics
The Impact of Covid-19 on the HIV Care Continuum in a Large Urban Southern Clinic
Teacher Effectiveness and Classroom Composition
This paper provides evidence of match effects in the teacher labour market by considering how teacher effectiveness varies by classroom composition. We combine random assignment of teachers with rich measures of teaching practices based on a popular teacher-evaluation protocol to overcome endogeneity challenges. We find significant complementarities between teaching practice and classroom composition for maths achievement. We use these estimates …
Toward the automated analysis of teacher talk in secondary ELA classrooms
Using Lesson-Specific Teacher Reports of Student Engagement to Investigate Innovations in Curriculum and Instruction
Teacher reports on school organizational functioning, curricular processes, and student engagement are a reliable means of ascertaining valuable information about classroom climate and learning outcomes. Yet, to date, the vast majority of quantitative teacher-reported data, where teachers themselves reach judgments about educational processes, have been summary rather than lesson specific, where teachers evaluate classroom experiences at the mome…
Using global observation protocols to inform research on teaching effectiveness and school improvement
An essential feature of many modern teacher observation protocols is their “global” approach to measuring instruction. Global protocols provide a summary evaluation of multiple domains of instruction from observers’ overall review of classroom processes. Although these protocols have demonstrated strengths, including their comprehensiveness and advanced state of development, in this analysis we argue that global protocols also have inherent limit…
School-to-School Differences in Instructional Practice
Background/Context There is continuing debate among social scientists and educators about the role of school-to-school differences in generating educational inequality. Are some students high achieving because they attend School A, while others struggle because they attend School B, as critical discourse on schools argues? Alternatively, is educational inequality driven largely by social forces outside of the school, in the home and neighborhood …
Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896
Re-Examining the Public-Catholic School Gap in STEM Opportunity to Learn
This paper examines public-Catholic gap in STEM opportunity to learn in the US using Mahalanobis-distance matching and adjacent categories models. Consistent with prior studies, there are significant public-Catholic differences in math and science course sequence level and total credits earned. However, we find that these gaps are largely accounted for by selection processes among students of differing family background. Moreover, we find that th…
Does receiving a school free lunch lead to a stigma effect? Evidence from a longitudinal analysis in South Korea
Geodesign application for bio-swale design
With increases in storm frequency and intensity, municipalities are finding new ways of managing stormwater. Solutions require collaboration across planning disciplines and input from an informed public. This study compares a system of bioswales to existing curb and gutter infrastructure in a post-industrial streetscape of Hamilton, Ontario. Using the geodesign process, a section of Ottawa St. North was modelled to show how green infrastructure c…
Who Gets to Read What? Tracking, Instructional Practices, and Text Complexity for Middle School Struggling Readers
In this study, the authors used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 to examine the instructional time allocation and instructional practices in eighth‐grade English language arts classes for struggling readers, as measured by track level. The authors also analyze the titles and text complexity of the last three books assigned to students. The authors found that track level continues to be a significant predictor …
AYP Status, Urbanicity, and Sector
This study investigates whether adequate yearly progress (AYP) status, locale, and sector—common variables used to judge the quality of schools—accurately signal true differences in instructional practices in high school mathematics and science. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS), we find the school-to-school variation in instructional practices to be minimal. Controlling for a variety of school and teacher characteristics,…
Automatically Measuring Question Authenticity in Real-World Classrooms
Analyzing the quality of classroom talk is central to educational research and improvement efforts. In particular, the presence of authentic teacher questions, where answers are not predetermined by the teacher, helps constitute and serves as a marker of productive classroom discourse. Further, authentic questions can be cultivated to improve teaching effectiveness and consequently student achievement. Unfortunately, current methods to measure qu…
There Is a Place Where Terror Is Good
This article performs an analysis of Aeschylus’ tragedy the Oresteia within the Lacanian model of the Four Discourses. The author contends that the myth, which dramatizes the transition from the ancient conception of the law based on familial revenge to the modern institution of law, may be viewed as a shift from a failed Master’s Discourse to the University Discourse. The cycle of revenge killings performed throughout the tragedy, culminating in…
Educational Inequality
In all countries, the educational outcomes of socioeconomically disadvantaged students are worse than those of their advantaged peers. As a result, many racial and ethnic minority groups have lower levels of educational achievement and attainment than majority groups. Yet, countries vary in the extent to which socioeconomic status is related to education outcomes, and country‐to‐country differences in educational inequality can be explained by th…
The Black-White Gap in Mathematics Course Taking
Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, this study investigated differences in the mathematics course taking of white and black students. Because of lower levels of achievement, prior course taking, and lower socioeconomic status, black students are much more likely than are white students to be enrolled in low-track mathematics courses by the 10th grade. Using multilevel models for categorical outcomes, the study found that th…
Curriculum tracking and teacher expectations
Do increased levels of parental involvement account for social class differences in track placement
What Types of Students' Effort Are Rewarded with High Marks
This analysis of data from the Partnership for Literacy Study investigates the relationship among achievement, effort, and grades. Certainly, grades reward achievement, the mastery of material by students. Research has also suggested that grades are used to reward students for exerting effort to learn material, even if students fall short of mastery. Indeed, some small-scale research has found that teachers reward students for merely cooperating …
Race, social class, and student engagement in middle school English classrooms
The Correlates of Tracking Policy
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 …
Are Teachers Tracked? On what Basis and with what Consequences
Automatically Measuring Question Authenticity in Real-World Classrooms
Analyzing the quality of classroom talk is central to educational research and improvement efforts. In particular, the presence of authentic teacher questions, where answers are not predetermined by the teacher, helps constitute and serves as a marker of productive classroom discourse. Further, authentic questions can be cultivated to improve teaching effectiveness and consequently student achievement. Unfortunately, current methods to measure qu…
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 identifyi…
Early Career Outcomes for the “Best and the Brightest”
Educational efforts aimed at attracting the “best and brightest” into the teaching profession are widespread and include national programs, such as Teach for America and the New Teacher Project Teaching Fellows, as well as regional and state-based programs, city-based programs, and university-based programs. Yet, studies of attrition in programs aimed at recruiting highly selective teachers provide some evidence that highly selective entrants are…
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…
Whither the virtuous cycle? Past and future trends in black-white inequality in educational attainment
Classroom discourse and the distribution of student engagement
School-to-School Variation in Disciplined Inquiry
In recent years No Child Left Behind has provided new labels to supposedly high- and low-performing schools and has identified large numbers of schools as low performing. Are school-to-school differences in the quality of instruction offered as great as the public is led to believe? Using the disciplined inquiry typology of Newman, Marks, and Gamoran, we examine whether variation in observable indicators of school quality correspond to real diffe…
Overcoming the Volatility in School-Level Gain Scores
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,…
America's Tyrant
Using Lesson-Specific Teacher Reports of Student Engagement to Investigate Innovations in Curriculum and Instruction
Teacher reports on school organizational functioning, curricular processes, and student engagement are a reliable means of ascertaining valuable information about classroom climate and learning outcomes. Yet, to date, the vast majority of quantitative teacher-reported data, where teachers themselves reach judgments about educational processes, have been summary rather than lesson specific, where teachers evaluate classroom experiences at the mome…
Teacher Effectiveness and Classroom Composition
This paper provides evidence of match effects in the teacher labour market by considering how teacher effectiveness varies by classroom composition. We combine random assignment of teachers with rich measures of teaching practices based on a popular teacher-evaluation protocol to overcome endogeneity challenges. We find significant complementarities between teaching practice and classroom composition for maths achievement. We use these estimates …
Toward the automated analysis of teacher talk in secondary ELA classrooms
Re-Examining the Public-Catholic School Gap in STEM Opportunity to Learn
This paper examines public-Catholic gap in STEM opportunity to learn in the US using Mahalanobis-distance matching and adjacent categories models. Consistent with prior studies, there are significant public-Catholic differences in math and science course sequence level and total credits earned. However, we find that these gaps are largely accounted for by selection processes among students of differing family background. Moreover, we find that th…
AYP Status, Urbanicity, and Sector
This study investigates whether adequate yearly progress (AYP) status, locale, and sector—common variables used to judge the quality of schools—accurately signal true differences in instructional practices in high school mathematics and science. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS), we find the school-to-school variation in instructional practices to be minimal. Controlling for a variety of school and teacher characteristics,…
Vocational education
A place at the table
Social Determinants of School-to-School Differences in Opportunity to Learn (OTL)
Do some students learn more than others because they attend School A instead of School B? Or is educational inequality generated elsewhere, from common processes within schools, or outside of formal schooling? Within these paradigmatic questions, this study investigates the social determinants of school-to-school differences in STEM course-taking experiences, a key component of Opportunity to Learn (OTL), in a cross-national setting. Drawing on a…
Who Gets to Read What? Tracking, Instructional Practices, and Text Complexity for Middle School Struggling Readers
In this study, the authors used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 to examine the instructional time allocation and instructional practices in eighth‐grade English language arts classes for struggling readers, as measured by track level. The authors also analyze the titles and text complexity of the last three books assigned to students. The authors found that track level continues to be a significant predictor …
New Faces for Old Forts
Gold was in short supply on European markets, and this was nearly a generation before Columbus and Cortez were to open the treasures of the Americas to Europe. The Portuguese probably overestimated the amount of gold available in Ghana. What they saw consisted chiefly of ornaments which had been accumulated over generations by Africans who had little means for exporting them until the Portuguese arrived
A Trip Through Lower Town
America's Tyrant
A Report on the Congressional Fellowship Program, 1993–94 and 1994–95
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Homeland Earth
Edgar Morin, one of the leading figures in European thought, challenges us to think differently about our past, our present, and our future. Morin points to the development of a planetary culture that is not homogenizing or fragmented, and the need to recognize complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity as potential sources of creativity, learning, and transformation. Given the uncertainty of our journey, Morin presents "complex thought" as a way to …
A place at the table
Risks to mental health patients discharged into the community
The advances in pharmacological and psychosocial treatments in the 1950s and 1960s facilitated the movement of care for increasing numbers of mentally ill people from the institutions to the community. This represented a radical change in mental health strategy and practice and has brought with it new sets of risks. Due to inherent stigmatisation and some well publicised cases of violence and murder, there is a perceived risk to the public from c…
Bridging Methodological Gaps
Quantitative analyses using CLASS 3.0 software and qualitative discourse analyses were conducted of the instructional and institutional effects of tracking in high- and low-track American literature classes taught by the same teacher, a participant in a national study of the effects of dialogic classroom discourse patterns on student achievement. The quantitative analyses of class activities and discourse patterns revealed somewhat different amou…
Are Teachers Tracked? On what Basis and with what Consequences
Do increased levels of parental involvement account for social class differences in track placement
Classroom discourse and the distribution of student engagement
Overcoming the Volatility in School-Level Gain Scores
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,…
Oral Narrative Genres as Dialogic Resources for Classroom Literature Study
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 discussio…
What Types of Students' Effort Are Rewarded with High Marks
This analysis of data from the Partnership for Literacy Study investigates the relationship among achievement, effort, and grades. Certainly, grades reward achievement, the mastery of material by students. Research has also suggested that grades are used to reward students for exerting effort to learn material, even if students fall short of mastery. Indeed, some small-scale research has found that teachers reward students for merely cooperating …
Race, social class, and student engagement in middle school English classrooms
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 identifyi…
The Black-White Gap in Mathematics Course Taking
Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, this study investigated differences in the mathematics course taking of white and black students. Because of lower levels of achievement, prior course taking, and lower socioeconomic status, black students are much more likely than are white students to be enrolled in low-track mathematics courses by the 10th grade. Using multilevel models for categorical outcomes, the study found that th…
Vocational education
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…
School-to-School Variation in Disciplined Inquiry
In recent years No Child Left Behind has provided new labels to supposedly high- and low-performing schools and has identified large numbers of schools as low performing. Are school-to-school differences in the quality of instruction offered as great as the public is led to believe? Using the disciplined inquiry typology of Newman, Marks, and Gamoran, we examine whether variation in observable indicators of school quality correspond to real diffe…
The Correlates of Tracking Policy
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 …
Producing Success
Obituary
Curriculum tracking and teacher expectations
Whither the virtuous cycle? Past and future trends in black-white inequality in educational attainment
Psychology (39 works) · Mathematics education (27 works) · Pedagogy (24 works) · School Choice and Performance (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Parental Involvement in Education (12 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (11 works) · Academic achievement (10 works)