Archive: Jan 2015

College teaching has undergone a revolution in recent years. Traditional styles of teaching and lecturing have been supplanted by a more interactive, student-centered approach known as “active learning.” In active learning classrooms, students practice skills, receive feedback from teachers, and then get a chance to implement teachers’ corrections as soon as they are given. While the benefits of active learning for liberal arts fields seem fairly intuitive, it is less obvious whether this approach can be successful in more technical and scientific fields where “knowledge” is seen as more concrete, universal, and fact-based. To find out whether active learning is beneficial in STEM classes, Scott Freeman and his colleagues conducted a metaanalysis of 225 studies comparing the outcomes of different teaching methods.

Freeman’s team found that undergraduates enrolled in STEM lecture courses were 1.5 times more likely to fail than those who took courses with elements of active learning. Students in active learning sections got higher exam scores (by 6%) and their vocabulary scores rose. The results held across STEM disciplines class sizes, although the greatest benefits were seen in classes with fewer than 50 students.

Carl Wieman, the 2001 Nobel Prize winner for Physics, is among a group of experts who also believe that active learning is the most effective instruction style for STEM. In an interview with Anna Kuchment for Scientific American, Wieman states that active learning works because it teaches students to think like scientists in the field, moving from background reading to applied work with targeted feedback and revision. In other words, active learning is a direct application of what cognitive psychology tells us about how we learn: by practicing, with feedback from an expert about what we’re doing right and wrong and how to get better.

Wieman believes that if future elementary and high school STEM teachers are taught with active learning, they could, in turn, potentially develop a much higher level of content mastery among their students. Wieman says, “[K-12 students] really require more subject expertise from the instructor than a lecture,” and these teachers will be better able to pass expertise on to their students.

Finally, better teaching and learning is expected to help attract and retain undergraduates in STEM majors. Because STEM degrees continue to be in high demand among employers, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has now set a goal of increasing the number of STEM bachelor’s degrees awarded each year by 33%. Adopting empirically validated teaching practices like active learning may be the best bet for meeting this objective while improving K-12 STEM education to boot.

Although public support for same-sex marriage has expanded, many Americans still oppose it. Religious beliefs and gender traditionalism are often cited as main reasons for the persistent opposition: many people interpret religious texts as condemning homosexual relationships, while others believe that traditional gender roles are central to the social fabric and that same-sex marriage undermines those roles. Yet many other contemporary behaviors, like divorce, transgress religious ideas and gender roles without generating nearly as much opposition. Why?

A new study by Andrew Whitehead in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion may help explain. Whitehead shows that being highly religious and preferring traditional gender roles are only associated with opposition to gay partnerships among those who see God as male. People who with no particular ideas about God’s gender are likely to support gay marriage, but those who view God as masculine and use male pronouns to refer to God are highly likely to oppose it. Other common views of God, such as seeing a creator as angry or as active in humans’ affairs, do not predict opposition to gay marriage. This finding indicates that religious belief does not determine opposition to gay marriage, but fits into a broader gendered understanding of social relationships. Same-sex marriage, for some, goes beyond the fulfillment of “proper” gender roles of men and women.

Religion matters, and so does gender traditionalism, but what’s really important is how religion and gender intersect to create culturally specific ways of understanding the world. For people who see God as masculine, opposing gay marriage is less an active political choice than a logical extension of deeply held beliefs in a gendered social reality.  

The last 30 years have seen a massive change in the American religious landscape: more and more people are deciding not to affiliate with any particular religion at all. What’s changed? Answers range from claims that religion is slowly dying out to listless and wandering millennials having no clear value system. When sociologists study these opinions over time, however, they find a number of changes and consistencies that might point to a more precise explanation.

In 2002, Michael Hout and Claude Fischer published a paper showing that the growth in religiously-unaffiliated Americans actually didn’t have much to do with individuals’ religious beliefs. Instead, political views and changes between generations had more of an impact on whether respondents identified with a religion. Now, about a decade later and with new data from the General Social Survey, they update their findings with some new trends. First, the growth in religious disaffiliation has remained steady since the late 1980s; while this group was only 8% of the population in 1990, it has since increased to 20% in 2012. At the group level, this is primarily due to young generations replacing older cohorts. But while the trend includes adults born in the 1960s, the authors emphasize that “young people who have become adults since 2000 express even less religious preference than any of the previous cohorts.”.

Using a new panel component to the GSS which tracked the same respondents over time, Hout and Fischer go on to show that respondents who shift towards liberal political views are more likely to drop a religious affiliation (and those who lean conservative are less likely to disaffiliate). The political effect dovetails with younger generations’ preferences for autonomy—the belief that it is important for individuals to think for themselves rather than obey traditional authorities. Hout and Fischer argue that growing up in a generation that values autonomy and codes conservative politics as “religious” is the best predictor of religious disaffiliation. Further, the authors emphasize that they do not see large spikes in atheism or other changes in beliefs. Rather, the most common belief among these younger generations is that there is truth in many religious traditions.

The standard story, then, is backwards. For younger generations, religious identities don’t determine values; they are an outcome of political beliefs. Thus, young people haven’t lost the faith—they have simply learned to express their values in voting booths instead of pews.

From civil rights to environmentalism, movements for social change have relied on coalitions that bring together diverse groups to increase their influence and resources. Yet, building and sustaining these coalitions is no easy task: it requires people and organizations take action on issues beyond their primary interests and create alliances across racial, class, and national lines.

To understand how these coalitions are created and sustained in day to day interactions, UCLA sociologist Laura Enriquez examined the contemporary immigrant rights movement and, in particular, a Southern Califonria, university-based coalition formed to help pass the DREAM Act (a federal law providing undocumented youth a path to citizenship). Enriquez found that having shared political beliefs and values motivated people to join the coalition and sustained collaboration and open discussion as the organization matured.

Enriquez found that the DREAM coalition was successful in navigating social, class, gender, and nationality-based tensions by emphasizing a common commitment to social justice rather than trying to create a single unified identity amongst the diverse group. Focusing on shared beliefs quickly mobilized people’s commitment – 25 student organizations joined the coalition in a few weeks – and provided a way for people to take on roles and tasks based on their individual identities. Thus, undocumented students often provided public emotional and personal appeals for the DREAM Act, while citizen students leveraged their voting power.

Coalitions are important. They provide a venue for sharing ideas and working through problems. Members of the DREAM coalition actively addressed social privilege and power within the group, which helped them rise above imbalances between documented and undocumented students and turn different legal statuses into an asset for the movement. Maintaining the coalition depended on having a space for sustained discussion and day-to-day interactions that helped participants overcome stereotypes and assumptions and reflect on their own privileges.