SOCY

Mollborn Incorporates New Research Methods in Sociology Course

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 07:00:00 +0000

Mollborn Incorporates New Research Methods in Sociology Course Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/15/2014 - 00:00

Stephanie Mollborn, Associate Professor of the CU �鶹ӰԺ Sociology Department, participated in ASSETT's Fall 2014 Teaching with Technology Seminar. She redesigned her course to cover general research methods. Watch her discuss her course here:

[video:https://youtu.be/3aRmd8Up8wo]

Teaching and Learning Challenge

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.

Plans for Implementation

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.

Indicators of Success

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.

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CU �鶹ӰԺ Grad Students Teach with Technology

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 07:00:00 +0000

CU �鶹ӰԺ Grad Students Teach with Technology Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/10/2014 - 00:00

Three CU �鶹ӰԺ Grad Students Talk to ASSETT about Teaching with Technology

Graduate students at CU �鶹ӰԺ have gone above and beyond to incorporate technology into their teaching. Josh LePree of the Sociology Department uses Twitter and Voicethread to encourage students to share their thoughts about class topics outside of class. Students nominated LePree for an ASSETT Outstanding Teaching with Technology Award in the Fall of 2013. Leah Holz in the French and Italian Department uses Yabla.com resources to expose her students to spoken French language. Holz went out of her way to improve her teaching when she participated in ASSETT's Flipped Classroom Workshop in the Summer of 2014. Suzie Wright in the Spanish Department uses Prezi in her teaching as a non-linear approach to presenting. Students nominated Wright for an ASSETT Outstanding Teaching with Technology Award in the Fall of 2013.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwIrVKJFoEM]

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Tweeting in Tyler's Crime and Society Courses

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Tweeting in Tyler's Crime and Society Courses Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/28/2014 - 00:00

Tweet for homework? This spring, CU �鶹ӰԺ students nominated Sociology graduate student Amanda Tyler for an ASSETT Outstanding Teaching with Technology Award for her teaching of Sociology 2044, Crime and Society. One student wrote, "We used both Clickers and Twitter to enhance learning and incorporate current events into the curriculum." Tyler spoke with ASSETT about how important it is for her to involve students in class discussions: "... I work toward creating an environment where students are able to discuss class material, even when the class has a large number of students. Clicker questions are a great way for me to engage my students in conversation." She says that she uses Clicker questions to poll students about their opinions and start discussions. Tyler explains that when students don't have to worry about whether their answers are right or wrong, the class can better engage multiple opinions. Also, Clicker questions help her gauge her students' understanding of material.

Using Twitter in Class Discussions

Additionally, Tyler creates class Twitter pages as venues for student participation. She embeds the class Twitter page feed onto the D2L course page and asks students to Tweet current event news stories or videos about class topics and write their own discussion questions for homework. Tyler says that she believes that Tweeting provides an opportunity, "... For students to apply course material to their everyday world." Tyler truly involves students in class discussion when she uses students' Tweeted questions as the class's Clicker questions. "Students often Tweet insightful questions that engage their peers in further discussion, so I like to highlight these questions in my lecture slides," says Tyler. In class, she projects the class Twitter feed onto the board and often invites students to Tweet their ideas during lecture. Tyler says that she finds that giving students the opportunity to join the spotlight motivates them: "I think Twitter makes class more fun! I believe that when students have fun learning, it is more likely that they do their homework, and they will want to attend class." Tyler says that she hopes that Tweeting may even help students better remember course material: "They might visually remember a term they learned in a Tweet, which will stick with them later ..."

Case in point: one day during a discussion about the value of eye witness testimony in court procedures, Tyler staged a mock eye witness activity. A colleague came into the classroom and quickly left again. Tyler asked her students to Tweet to the class Twitter page what they remembered they saw. When the students' realized how few of them had accurately remembered what the man had been wearing, they better understood the validity that is often lacking in eye witness testimonies.

In order to give students participation credit for their Tweets, Tyler assigns specific hashtags to each week's Tweets and periodically asks them to submit screen shot logs.

Tyler looks forward to a career in teaching at the college level: "Teaching is one of my greatest passions! It always keeps me on my toes. I am constantly researching and thinking about new ways to engage my students. Being nominated for this award is an incredible honor!"

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Success in Sociology Graduate Student Zach Owens's Online Courses

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Success in Sociology Graduate Student Zach Owens's Online Courses Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/08/2014 - 00:00

Sociology graduate student Zachary Owens has taught at CU �鶹ӰԺ for seven years, and this past spring was his first time teaching an online course. Owens's online students nominated him for an ASSETT Teaching with Technology Award for Sociology 1016, Sex, Gender, and Society. Owens says that for him, teaching online,

... was a great learning experience ... I wanted to make sure the students had the ability to interact with each other and also with me ... I think the great beauty of college is the interaction that takes place between students and also the student-instructor interaction, [and] ... I didn't want to lose that interaction ... I wanted to make sure students had the ability to interact with each other and also with me ... I like to be an active teacher and engage the class.

To achieve this level of interaction in an online classroom, Owens asks his students to participate in online discussions. Owens makes it clear at the beginning of the semester that the online discussion should be a safe place to present personal opinion and even critique others' ideas. He says,

A professor of mine once said, 'Remember, we critique ideas, not people,' and that's something I tell all of my students in every class I teach. It's okay to disagree with an idea, and I actually encourage that because I believe that having our opinions challenged is an excellent way to learn and grow as an intellectual.

Owens says that once students understand that the online discussion board is a safe place to express their own thoughts and opinions and to engage in constructive discussions with peers who may disagree, he gets the opportunity to better know his students. Owens says that taking the time to prepare thoughts and contribute to weekly discussions gives students an opportunity to contribute more thoroughly and authentically. "They don't face the fear of public speaking," he explains, as they would in a traditional classroom. Owens says that he received positive feedback from his students about the online discussions: "I think [the online discussion] was really productive ... At the end of the course, [several] students said that was their favorite part of the course."

Owens also mentions the accessibility that the online classroom affords to non-traditional students, who may be based all over the country or otherwise be unable to be present in traditional college classrooms. He says that he thinks those students only further complement the student body makeup:

Life experiences change people's perceptions ... It adds a level of diversity ... Technology helps spread the ability for a lot of people to get an education that they may not have been able to get in the past ... Some students have medical reasons that prevent them from being on campus ... They would have otherwise have had to take the semester off!

In place of in-class lectures, Owens records his voice lecturing alongside his PowerPoint slides playing. Owens posts the recordings online for students to watch. He says that he tries to keep his lectures to 45 minutes, and he occasionally includes open ended questions for students to ponder while listening: "When teaching in an online environment, you're not bound by four walls to keep you paying attention."

Owen plans to finish his dissertation this school year. He would like to launch his career in a teaching-focused higher education environment:

I want to end up at an academic institution where teaching is the priority ... I love teaching. It's what I want to do ... The more I teach, the more I like it. I definitely know I picked the right career path.

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Hearing Students' Voices Through Twitter and Voicethread in Josh LePree's Sociology Courses

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Hearing Students' Voices Through Twitter and Voicethread in Josh LePree's Sociology Courses Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/25/2014 - 00:00

Josh LePree has a vision for teaching that transcends the classroom: "[I want] to create a seamless environment for class [so that] ... it seems like there's no break between [class and homework]," says LePree. He is a Sociology PhD student at CU �鶹ӰԺ and has been teaching at the college level for four years now. Students nominated LePree for an ASSETT Outstanding Teaching with Technology Award last year, and one student wrote: "Technology use was a large part of our classroom and homework discussions in [LePree]'s Race and Ethnicity class."

The Sociology Department awarded LePree for his vision with the Special Topics in Sociology GPTI Fellowship for the Spring 2014 semester. LePree designed and taught the Spring 2014 Sociological Perspectives on Migration: Gender, Race and the State course (SOCY 2091). He created a class Twitter page and instructed students to hashtag it in a new tweet each week. Students needed to hashtag both the class and the week of class (see the screenshot from the class Twitter page, below) to get participation credit for that week. That way, LePree could just go to the Twitter page #SOCY2091 #WK2 to grade students' participation on the class Twitter page for the week! If students were concerned about keeping personal and class Twitter Handles (aliases) separate, LePree encouraged them to create new handles just for class with their names and the course name--just like he did (@LePreeSOCY).

To make the out-of-class Twitter threads even more relevant to class discussion, LePree would regularly bring in students' tweets of articles and videos that related to class topics. Consequently, one student wrote in her nomination of LePree for the ASSETT Teaching with Technology Award that posting original discussion questions on the class Twitter page for homework made her feel less anonymous in class:

Twitter was used for [LePree] and his students to share pertinent videos, ideas, and discussion questions to which the entire class had access. I as a student thought that the use of Twitter was an ingenious way to include everyone's thoughts since sometimes larger classes can make students feel 'invisible.' ... I thought that [LePree]'s use of Twitter was also really effective because he used it to facilitate in-class discussions with Tweets that students had previously posted.

At the same time that LePree uses Twitter to bridge homework and class discussion, he also embeds his classes' Twitter feeds onto the D2L course pages. That way, students' latest tweets greet them when they login to the course home page on D2L, and, "They can see what other students are tweeting about," says LePree.

LePree viewed incorporating Twitter into class discussion and homework as a trial-and-error process: "I didn't know how it would work out," he admits. LePree asks students for feedback halfway through the semester: "'Do you have any ideas beyond what we've tried? What's working and what's not?'" LePree listens to students' feedback and gives credit to them for the success: “Students are the authority with technology," he says.

Voicethread Lends Authenticity to Student-to-Student Feedback

LePree didn't stop with class discussion and homework--he has also innovated students' final presentation formats, assigning Voicethread as the medium. Students still create PowerPoint presentations, but they also upload them to Voicethread. Then, Voicethread allows students to record themselves speaking over slides to create what LePree calls a, "narrated slideshow." This format could be considered much less intimidating with more room for smoothing out presentation bumps than would be standing and making a presentation live in front of the class.

Since Voicethread was new to many students, LePree invited OIT Academic Technology Consultant Courtney Fell to visit the class and train students in using it. Furthermore, he pairs students with 'feedback partners.' Students record comments on Voicethread for their feedback partners to help improve one another's presentations along the way. LePree says that recording voiceover commentary is more personal than is sending typed comments back and forth. "I was blown away by their Voicethread discussions," he says. "The gratification that I get as an instructor was a huge payoff. I couldn't stop honoring them in class."

As part of his fellowship, LePree recently led a brownbag lunch discussion for other Sociology graduate students about "Designing Your Own Course Curriculum." He looks forward to continuing his career in teaching at the university level. "I appreciate my students," says LePree. "I'll never go backwards."

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Teaching with Technology: Tim Wadsworth

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Teaching with Technology: Tim Wadsworth Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/22/2012 - 00:00

During the Teaching with Technology seminar series, Tim Wadsworth, an Associate Professor in CU’s department of Sociology, analyzed the effectiveness of his online courses in his presentation. The biggest challenge Dr. Wadsworth encountered was to get students engaged, especially during the summer, so he needed to find a solution to this problem.

Thinking about how to encourage student participation in an online course, Wadsworth employed digital quizzes to prompt the class to spend more time with the readings. To push students to spend more time with the course materials, online quizzes were employed in the class with a thorough series of questions to ensure that his pupils read all the course material. Wadsworth designed the questions so that it required his students to remain actively engaged with the course materials.

For class assignments, Wadsworth decided to give several options to his students, which included traditional papers or, videos, or applying other aspects of technology to their projects. The individuals who opted to create a video posted their films to YouTube or Vimeo for both the class and the world at large to view. The only issue Wadsworth faced was how to be objective and fair when grading a video versus a standard research paper. Although this assignment proved to possess some problems, such as the difficulty with grading, it largely benefited the students and the classroom as a whole as it led to more creative projects and more participation in discussions. Wadsworth discovered that with these projects, more students failed, but also more received As, meaning his approach engaged the class at a deeper level. Also it became clear through these assignments that students took more risks, resulting in more creativity and thus better projects. Lastly, through these homework assignments, Wadsworth found that class discussions became more thorough and dynamic as students possessed a better understanding of the course materials.

As the issue of student engagement is always a consideration for professors across the world, technology needs to be effectively leveraged to provide a better classroom and learning experience. Wadsworth has discovered some methods to improve participation in his online sociology courses, but he must continually evaluate and improve on these approaches as technology is constantly changing. Through incorporating some simple tools like digital quizzes and technology-oriented assignments, Wadsworth created a more inclusive as well as effective course where students truly learned the material.

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A Socio-Cultural View of Clickers in the Classroom

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:15:00 +0000

A Socio-Cultural View of Clickers in the Classroom Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/30/2009 - 08:15

Angel Hoekstra is a graduate student in sociology at CU studying clickers. Her dissertation, “Use of Clickers in Higher Education: A Socio-Cultural Analysis,” analyzed students’ opinions on clicker use in Chemistry and Sociology courses. Her research methods include interviews, observation, and anonymous student responses.

Hoekstra reports that “[e]xisting research on Student Response System use in natural science courses lacks systematic analysis of how clickers affect students socially: both as individuals working in small groups to solve problems, and as participants in a learning community.” Her research seeks to fill this gap in our current knowledge of clickers. It also highlights the idea that clickers are more than one-way tools that professors use to gather group responses or give short quizzes. Clicker questions, particularly those on controversial topics, impact students both academically and socially.

Teachers have a variety of reasons for using clickers. Some create clicker quizzes, where students are asked to discuss the answer to a question and are then graded on their response. Other professors use clickers to determine where students stand on sensitive topics. Others use clickers to force students to think critically about the material, or as a basis for class discussion. Students’ reactions to clicker questions will vary according to the role clickers play in the classroom. Questions concerning very personal beliefs will influence students in ways that reading comprehension questions will not. For example, a student who holds the minority view on a debated topic might feel alienated from their classmates. Faculty can be sensitive to how clicker questions affect students socially and culturally.

Hoekstra’s research will help professors recognize how clicker use impacts students. She reports that “[p]reliminary analysis of the data gathered for this thesis indicates that public display of clicker histograms (visual representations of student votes) affects solidarity and student behavior in the learning community, with both beneficial and detrimental effects for student learning.” Her work will provide a broader idea of how students respond to clicker questions. Faculty can then use this knowledge to improve how they integrate clickers into their classes.

The ITS webpage contains information for both faculty and students concerning clicker use. If you are interested getting help with clickers, please contact an ASSETT DATC. Contact an ASSETT DATC through the "Find Someone" link on this site, through 5-HELP, or by sending an email to help@colorado.edu. Please contact Angel.Hoekstra@colorado.edu if you have questions about her research on clickers.

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