Teaching and Learning in Sociology Past, Present, and Future

McKinney, Kathleen; Howery, Carla B.

doi:10.4135/9781412939645.n100

Cited by 50 publications

(101 citation statements)

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“…If we want to give our sociology students the ability to consume quantitative sociological research critically and effectively, a common goal is to grapple with research articles. Indeed, as discussed in the literature review, this is a stated goal of an official ASA report (McKinney et al 2004). We do not want them to flounder, however, encountering statistical techniques for which we have not provided them adequate training to interpret.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to a report from the ASA, preparing our students to engage with the sociological literature is an important goal (McKinney et al 2004). The preceding review of the statistically oriented literature, however, reveals this to be a daunting task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wagenaar (2004), through his nationwide survey of 301 sociologists, found that on a scale from 1 (skill requires no coverage) to 7 (skill is fundamental and deserves extensive coverage), every measure relating to statistics score highly: quantitative methods ( M = 5.9), social statistics ( M = 5.6), and “use and assess research” ( M = 6.1). A 2004 ASA report (McKinney et al 2004) recommended that sociology majors should take a statistic course (preferably taught within a sociology department) and that sociology majors should be able to “read professional articles that use different research methods and critically comment on them” (McKinney et al 2004:9). Delia Deckard (2017) discovered that two-thirds of the 90 sociology programs she surveyed required one statistics course, with an additional 7 percent requiring more than one course.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

From Measures of Association to Multilevel Models: Sociology Journals and the Quantitative Literacy Gap

Linneman

2020

Teach Sociol

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While most sociology majors must take a statistics course, the content of this course varies widely across departments. Starting from the assumption that sociology students should be able to engage effectively with the sociological literature, this article examines the statistical techniques used in 2,804 journal articles—from four generalist sociology journals from 1990 to 2019 and 11 additional sociology journals from 2019—in order to assess which techniques have risen or fallen in prevalence. Although stalwarts such as ordinary least squares regression, chi-square tests, and t tests maintain strong presences, the rise of logistic regression, interaction effects, and multilevel models has been dramatic. After assessing the proportion of articles students hypothetically could understand given various levels of statistical training, the article ends with suggestions for how to revamp the statistics course to help our students become more numerate citizens, both in their sociology courses and in the world at large.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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From Measures of Association to Multilevel Models: Sociology Journals and the Quantitative Literacy Gap

Linneman

2020

Teach Sociol

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“…Research experience courses became popular in the early 2000s in the United States in response to emerging pedagogical research that emphasized experiential, inquiry-driven learning as a medium for obtaining transferrable skills, higher retention rates, and greater student satisfaction with their degree (Boyer 1998; Cuthbert, Arunachalam, and Licina 2012). The growing demand for REU courses in sociology can be attributed to the way these courses offer high-impact and marketable skills, deepen the sociological imagination, stoke students’ excitement about social science, and prepare them for graduate school (Cuthbert et al 2012; Lopatto 2010; McKinney et al 2004). The goal of an REU course is to achieve “deep learning,” such that “learning reflects a personal commitment to understand the material” and involves “integrating and synthesizing information with prior learning in ways that become part of one’s thinking” (Laird et al 2008:470).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Kitchen Table Pedagogy for Interrogating Whiteness through a Research Experience Course

Friedman

Graham

2018

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

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After sociology undergraduates have learned about inequalities in their substantive courses, a research experience course in which they critically apply these concepts can be invaluable for fostering deep learning. Coteaching a sociological research experience for undergraduates course three times, the authors witnessed the emergence of an emotional connection to critical perspectives on race and ethnicity that enabled students to analyze and creatively apply these concepts to their research projects. The inquiry-based course was built around the authors’ current research project on how families with tween and/or teen children manage food provisioning. Although the course was not explicitly about race or whiteness, many students could relate to the marginalization felt by study participants because of their own ethnicity or race, leading the whole class to become a cohesive team that was attuned to the power of white supremacy in food discourse. Here the authors describe two key assignments they believe were essential components of the course: (1) writing and sharing your food autobiography and (2) analyzing “what’s interesting here?” to find themes in the interview data. The authors found that the intercultural sensitivity cultivated in the first weeks of the course through personal storytelling carried forward into the interviewing process, into the grounded theory discussions that took place in the classroom, and into the students’ final research projects. The result was that each semester, students interrogated the whiteness of American food discourse by studying the forms of difference embedded in the food stories of themselves and of the study participants.

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“…Here in the United States, in 2013, the American Sociological Association (ASA) released the “Sociological Companion Document,” which listed sociology core requirements for high school teachers of introductory sociology (Ferguson 2016). For higher education, evidence of core content area for sociology can be found in Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major (McKinney et al 2004), which identified 16 areas of knowledge and competence recommendations for the development and structuring of a sociology curriculum. Also, the 2008 ASA Task Force on College-Level Introduction to Sociology Course reported nine topics (the sociological perspective, research methods, culture, socialization, social organization, social inequalities, deviance and conformity, social institutions, and social change) as learning goals for introductory sociology (Ferguson 2016).…”

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confidence: 99%

Thoroughness in Explanation of Substructure-Superstructure Relations in Introductory Sociology Textbooks

2020

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The introductory sociology course is typically the only course most students take in sociology; hence, the introductory textbook becomes the only sociology textbook they may ever read as college students. The textbook, however, often lacks rigor in explaining concepts. This study focused on the thoroughness of explanations of the relations of substructure and superstructure of society by Karl Max (economic determinism) and Max Weber (ideological determinism) in a sample of introductory sociology textbooks. We found only one textbook to be consistently thorough in explaining both determinisms, and most textbooks were rated as low in their explanations of both concepts. We argue for greater thoroughness in introductory sociology textbooks, especially in the interest of students who participate in online learning and those who may not take another course in sociology and whose impression of the discipline would be framed by the introductory textbook.

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Teaching and Learning in Sociology Past, Present, and Future

Cited by 50 publications

References 0 publications

From Measures of Association to Multilevel Models: Sociology Journals and the Quantitative Literacy Gap

From Measures of Association to Multilevel Models: Sociology Journals and the Quantitative Literacy Gap

A Kitchen Table Pedagogy for Interrogating Whiteness through a Research Experience Course

Thoroughness in Explanation of Substructure-Superstructure Relations in Introductory Sociology Textbooks

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