{"id":2260,"date":"2015-02-16T11:41:45","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T16:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/teaching\/?p=2260"},"modified":"2020-02-11T20:01:27","modified_gmt":"2020-02-12T01:01:27","slug":"intro-to-sociological-methods-using-reading-lists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/teaching\/2015\/02\/16\/intro-to-sociological-methods-using-reading-lists\/","title":{"rendered":"Intro to Sociological Methods Using Discoveries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: At the time this post was written, The Society Pages’ Discoveries<\/a><\/em> were called The Reading List.<\/p>\n

\"DISC<\/a>Findings about lifetime earnings, fertility, graduation rates, and gentrification are interesting all on their own, but how do sociologists go about studying these topics? To address this question for my Intro to Sociology class, I began with a 10-min. mini-lecture on \u201cMethods\u201d based on the info in Ch. 2 of Dalton Conley<\/a>\u2019s You May Ask Yourself<\/i> textbook. (The students had SQ3R<\/a>ed this chapter for homework.) To kick it off, I reviewed how sociology was different from the other disciplines—our topic from the previous class, and then got into the new material about variables, samples, qualitative and quantitative, methods, etc.<\/p>\n

So that the students could develop a fuller sense of the new concepts they learned, I created this methods sheet<\/a> for the class to practice applying them. First, as an example, we answered the questions from the sheet about the first article in the Reading List Packet<\/a> together as a class. Students were able to ask questions about the procedure and I could clarify the directions before they tried one on their own.<\/p>\n

Then, students were instructed to get into small groups of 2 or 3. Each group was directed to work on answering the questions about a different Reading List<\/a> article. When all groups had finished, each reported back to the class what the question, findings and methods were.<\/p>\n

Why I like this activity:<\/p>\n