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The Problem

This semester, I need to create a new, high-quality required course in Sociological research methods that engages students in actual research and active learning, yet is conducted in a large-class format that can be taught by different faculty.

The Course's Big Idea

Sociological research offers a lot of tools to investigate questions about the social world.  These tools have different pros and cons and need to be used in a high-quality way.

What's Needed

Students will need background content and tools to be able to conduct research and create questions about the social world. This is complicated by the fact that many students will be intimidated about using either qualitative or quantitative methods. The professor knows some of the needed technologies but will need to learn others within a limited time frame. The structural constraints are that the class needs to be taught in a large format of up to 125 students in a regular classroom.

The Goal

Instead of teaching passive knowledge from a textbook, I want to design the course around active learning and use of Sociological research methods. Students will conduct small-scale but high-quality sociological research of various types, and understand the appropriate uses of the different types. Assessments will be research projects, conducted in groups and individually. To achieve this goal, students will need to engage in collaboration, data collection and analysis, critical thinking, assessment, presenting work, and engagement with Sociological literature.

This semester I need to create a new, high-quality sociological research methods required course that engages students in actual research and active learning, yet is conducted in a large-class format that can be taught by different faculty. This course should incorporate technologies to facilitate active learning in the large-class format.

Instead of teaching passive knowledge from a textbook, I want to design the course around active learning and use of sociological research methods. Students will conduct small-scale but high-quality sociological research of various types, and understand the appropriate uses of the different types. Assessments will be research projects, conducted in groups and individually. To achieve this goal, they will need to engage in collaboration, data collection and analysis, critical thinking, assessment, presenting work, and engagement with sociological literature. The class will be taught with up to 125 students, with the professor and a reader/grader. This will create some constraints for active learning and collaborative research that I need to address using technology.

I plan to implement the following technological tools, some new to me and some not, for the following purposes:

Lectures/Course Material

Clickers: For encouraging active learning and small and large group discussion in class. I already use this and feel comfortable with it.

VoiceThread: For students to create collaborative presentations of key course material.

D2L online assessments: To assess student understanding of this material through short quizzes administered outside of class

Group Research Projects

These research projects will allow students to collect original data using four sociological methods: surveys, interviews, observations, and content analysis. Each of these projects will have a short paper as its final product, in addition to the data they collected and the instruments they used to collect it. They will do most of these projects in groups, then pick their favorite project and build on it for their final course paper.

Google Drive and Google Hangout: For group collaboration on original research and collaborative editing of write-ups

Zotero: For group collaboration on literature reviews for research projects, for sharing the work of gathering relevant lit review/content analysis materials, and for group sociological analysis in content analysis project

Qualtrics: For fielding online and paper surveys for the survey analysis project

SPSS: For conducting simple data analysis for the survey analysis project

Timeline

I need to submit a course proposal in the next couple of months, but the course will not be taught until next fall. This gives me some time to work on the rather complicated implementation of multiple new technologies.

This is going to be the hardest part of my project. Because the goal is to create a completely new course that hasn’t been taught before in our department, there is no “control group,” or baseline, to compare to. The technological innovations will also be woven through essentially every aspect of the course, so I can’t compare student performance on technology-enhanced segments of the class with their performance on other segments.

For this reason, I plan to take the approach I used in my earlier scholarship of teaching and learning: subjective student assessments. I will occasionally ask students to write a “minute paper” giving me feedback on how they think use of certain technological tools or pedagogical strategies (which include technology) are going, and how they are learning in this course. This will be supplemented by clicker questions gathering anonymous feedback from the students on different aspects of the course and on their understanding of different concepts. Finally, in the course FCQs, I will ask students to address in the open-ended comments how they think the course went and about the use of technologies in the class. This multimethod assessment can’t get very well at comparing objective measures of students’ learning, but it does provide both depth and breadth of subjective assessments at various time points in the class. This will help me improve the class for its second offering.

After the session on assessment, I have also decided to add teacher reflections as an assessment component. This is likely to add an additional perspective that will complement students’ subjective assessments. Both my teaching assistants and I will participate in these reflections, independently and collaboratively.