Critical Sociological Thinking and Higher-level Thinking: A Study of Sociologists’ Teaching Goals and Assignments

Abstract

We argue that the literature on critical thinking in sociology has conflated two different skill sets: critical sociological thinking and higher-level thinking. To begin to examine how sociologists weigh and cultivate these skill sets, we interviewed 20 sociology instructors and conducted a content analysis of 26 assignments. We found that while multiple interviewees considered critical thinking to be too obvious a goal to warrant discussion, it did emerge as a criterion for evaluating assignments. In addition, we created a spectrum of writing tasks and found that only a minority of assignments (5 of 26) could be classified as eliciting higher-level thinking. These were found exclusively in advanced courses, where they were still outnumbered by assignments eliciting lower-level thinking by nearly 2 to 1.

“Everyone Is Supersmart Now”: Learning Higher-Level and Critical Sociological Thinking from the Dystopian Satire of M.T. Anderson’sFeed

“…Assigning sociology of media students Feed has the potential to navigate student and disciplinary knowledge (Pallas and Neumann 2019). If the potential for navigation is realized and accessible assignments are truly offering students a better pathway to connecting with academic research, these assignments should also provoke critical thinking and application of the sociological imagination by offering an opportunity for students to display both higherlevel (Geertsen 2003;Kane and Otto 2018;Massengill 2011) and critical sociological thinking (Grauerholz and Bouma-Holtop 2003) The Assignment and Learning Objectives Higher-level thinking, as defined by Geertsen (2003:4), reflects a "disciplined, systematic way of using the mind to confirm existing information or to search for new information using various degrees of abstraction." Geertsen elaborates on Bloom, Krathwohl, and Masia's (1956) taxonomy of educational objectives, distinguishing between degrees of abstraction of micro-thinking skills, with the greater degrees of abstraction representing the higher levels of thinking.…”

“…Students often indicate they recognize this connection, emphasizing the utility of Feed for convergent teaching (Pallas and Neumann 2019). In the following, I outline the assignment and detail the value I hypothesize it holds for developing students' critical sociological and higher-level thinking skills (Kane and Otto 2018).…”

The promise of a health professions education imagination

“…In fact, in a recent study examining sociology professors' goals and objectives for their teaching, the most commonly stated desire was to increase 'critical sociological thinking' within their students, which explicitly included the development and use of students' sociological imaginations. 30 These professors aim to teach their students to 'de-personalize behaviors, identities, accomplishments, and failures and instead place them within an interactional, group, and institutional context', 31 often by connecting class examples to students' lived experiences. In the process, they model 'self-reflective critical thinking' and the kind of 'two-way thinking' that Mills advocates.…”

Fronts Matter: The Effectiveness of an “Edited Book” Project in Classical Theory

“…The review of curricula has confirmed that sociology instructors have heeded the call to compel greater engagement with the material through writing (Coker and Scarboro 1990) and that some departments have even adopted a more coordinated program-wide approach to introducing writing as an activity (Burgess-Proctor et al 2014; Ciabattari 2013). Despite enthusiasm about experimenting with various styles of writing, however, Kane and Otto (2018) noted that higher level critical thinking and sociological critical thinking are two different things and cautioned that a combination of nontraditional and discipline-specific forms of writing are still needed to accomplish both objectives.…”

“…Significant aspects of the edited book assignment were in fact grounded in approaches similar to Kane and Otto’s (2018) that growingly advocate for more discipline-specific writing and in the composition literature that recognizes the benefits of writing in the discipline (WID) for making the connection between writing and substantive knowledge more direct. For instance, increased participation of faculty from various disciplines allows assignments such as written laboratory reports in STEM to become connectors between “doing” discipline-based activities and “knowing” the field, which entails some practice writing within a specific genre (Carter 2007).…”