The achievement gap has been the focus of a good deal of research, attention, and hopeful new practices, yet it has hardly decreased. Using insights from sociolinguistic and sociocultural studies of classrooms in concert with practices developed by teacher researchers in the tradition of the Brookline Teacher Researcher Seminar, the author…

A cognitive-based system of analysis of spoken discourse was designed to provide details about the way pupils think and talk about issues arising from prose material. Written and spoken responses were analyzed to examine the effects of intellectual ability, differences in the stimulus passage, and prior small group discussion. (Note: Page…