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Most students in high school English classrooms do not receive high-quality instruction and they find classes to be rather non-involving places. In a recent national study, UW-Madison professor of sociology and education Adam Gamoran and colleague William Carbonaro (now at the University of Notre Dame) documented instructional quality and sources of inequality in the types of English instruction found in different types of classes. The researchers found that passive activities dominated at all track levels and that students had limited opportunities to answer open-ended questions, to work in cooperative learning groups, to direct the classroom activity, or to make decisions about what happened in class. All classes would benefit from greater coherence across activities and subjects, and from greater incorporation of students' ideas and experiences into the ongoing flow of lessons.

For more information, contact Gamoran at Gamoran@ssc.wisc.edu.