Assessing course goals is often challenging; assessing an abstract goal, like empathy, can be especially so. For many instructors, empathy is central to sociological thinking. As such, fostering empathy in students is a common course goal. In this article, we report the initial findings of a semester-long assessment of empathy change in undergraduate students (N = 619). We employ a mixed-methods research design that utilizes qualitative instructor data to determine independent instructor-level variables and student surveys to measure student empathy change.
Replicating published studies promotes active learning of quantitative research skills. Drawing on experiences from a replication course, we provide practical tips and reflections for teachers who consider incorporating replication in their courses. We discuss teaching practices and challenges we encountered at three stages of a replication course: student recruitment, course structure and proceedings, and learning outcomes. We highlight that by engaging in replication, students learn from established scholarly work in a collaborative and reflective manner.
Previous scholarship has demonstrated the value of high-impact practices of community engagement, inquiry-based pedagogy, and collaborative learning for engagement and learning in sociology courses, especially undergraduate research methods and statistics. This article explores the changes made to an upper-division undergraduate course focused on applied research practices and community-level interventions.
This article investigates the effects of teaching about metacognition in a sociological theory course. I created a series of teaching interventions to introduce students to the science of learning, including an interactive lecture on metacognition, a discussion that models metacognitive strategies, and activities for students to practice metacognition. This article describes those teaching interventions and assesses whether direct instruction led to greater use of metacognitive and cognitive strategies, confidence, and motivation to learn.
We discuss findings from a survey of sociology students in Germany and consequences for teaching. We focus on the de facto formation of a sociological canon, the relation between theories and methods, and effects of social and political characteristics on student’s scientific preferences. Our findings suggest that irrespective of an agreement of the sociological professionals on a common definition of a core, a de facto canon of theories and methods exists in teaching practices. Moreover, specific relations between sociological theories and methods occur in the data.
ASA speaks with sociology graduate student Simone Kolysh at the 2016 ASA Annual Meeting on August, 2016, in Seattle, WA. Kolysh talks about what it means to “do sociology,” how she uses sociology in her work, highlights of her work in the field, the relevance of sociological work to society, and her advice to students interested in entering the field.
