Sean Kelly

Contact Information

Sean Kelly
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Center for Research on Educational Opportunity
University of Notre Dame
1015 Flanner Hall
Notre Dame Indiana, 46556

E-mail: Sean.P.Kelly.206@nd.edu
Office: 574-631-3166
Home: 574-246-1547

Degrees

B.A. Sociology, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
M.S. Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ph.D. Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Honors/Awards

Spencer Foundation Exemplary Dissertation Award (awarded at the 2008 AERA Annual Meeting, New York, NY)

2003 David L. Stevenson Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award, the American Sociological Association, Sociology of Education Section.

Educational research interests

Problems of student engagement; The process of matching teachers to classrooms; The assignment of diverse students to course sequences in high school; The causes of teacher attrition.

Current educational studies

Vocational Education: A Clean-Slate for Disengaged Students?

A Decade of Change in Course Taking Policies

The Relationship between Tracking, Teacher Expectations, and Educational Attainment: Evidence from a Discrepant Course Taking Model

Select publications

2008 Kelly, Sean and Jessica C. Collett. From C.P. Ellis to school integration:
The social psychology of conflict reduction. Sociology Compass, 2(5), 1638-1654.

2008 Kelly, Sean. Race, social class, and student engagement in Middle school English classrooms. Social Science Research, 37, 434-448.

2008 Kelly, Sean. What types of student effort are rewarded with high marks? Sociology of Education, 81, 32-52.

2008 Kelly, Sean. Tracking. (pp. 983-988) in N. J. Salkind (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Bio

Sean Kelly has degrees in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (BA with honors) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MS, Phd). He is a faculty researcher at the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity, and a fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame. Before coming to Notre Dame, Dr. Kelly was a survey research specialist at the Research Triangle Institute and the UW-Survey Center, and most recently, a statistician at the National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement.

His research on the social-psychological determinants of student engagement and the teaching practices that foster high levels of engagement among all students received an Exemplary Dissertation Award from the Spencer Foundation and has appeared in Social Psychology of Education, Social Science Research, and Sociology of Education. He teaches coursework in the sociology of education and statistics for social scientists.