Teaching practices within advanced classes have long been ignored in the research of effective teaching methods and strategies. With the explosive growth in the past decade of the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) Program there exists a huge segment of American high school education that must be examined to learn how to best educate advanced students. This study examines four Advanced Placement classes in four different disciplines at a small private high school in order to identify some common factors defining teacher effectiveness. Four teachers were observed four times each to collect data regarding their use of class time, the assignments they gave to their students, and their questioning strategies. The teachers were grouped placed into two groups, high pass rate and low pass rate, based upon their prior students pass rate percentage on AP exams.

The results indicate that the high pass rate teachers used a greater percentage of class time than did the low pass rate teachers. The strongest positive correlation was between teacher pass rate and the percentage of class time used by the teacher (r = .802, p >.05) Results also showed that high pass rate teachers gave more assignments to their students than the low pass rate teachers (r = .768, p >.05), and a moderate correlation between the high pass rate teachers and low pass rate teachers with regard to the type of assignments they gave (r = .429, p >.05). There was a slight negative correlation between the teacher pass rate and the average level (Bloom’s taxonomy) of question (s) they asked (r = -.289, p >.05). There was a strong negative correlation between the number of questions teachers asked in a class period and the teacher’s pass rate (r = -.906, p >.05). Two implications of this study are that high pass rate teachers use a greater percentage of class time than low pass rate teachers, and high pass rate teachers give more assignments to their students than low pass rate teachers.