Hi Susan, This sounds like a wonderful exercise and I would like to try it. You say that you "... usually end with: Is there any obvious reason the research..." Could you please finish this sentence? The end of the sentence is not included in my email message.
Thanks! Happy New Year, Darlaine -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] To: Denise Copelton Cc: Teach-Soc Sent: 1/9/2006 5:19 PM Subject: TEACHSOC: Re: Suggestions for accessible article Regarding - Research methods and our first sociology students Denise and others - Many of my students can't even seem to find a journal article when they arrive in my classroom, much to my dismay. For the last several semesters, I have used this strategy. For the second week of class (first class meeting of the week), I ask them to bring in "a piece of research" - that's the assignment. Nearly every student complies and I make it a point to tell them when making the assignment that they can't fail if they bring in any graph, article, chart, etc. that they consider research. At the beginning of the class when they arrive with their "piece of research," I have the meet in groups of three or four. Their task is to examine each piece of research and evaluate it (1. What is the source?, 2. What do you know about the source? Do you trust it? Is it scholarly?, 3. What did the researcher(s) hope to find? 4. How did they collect information?, etc. . . . I usually end with: Is there any obvious reason the reseach After 15 minutes, I ask several groups (or all if time permits) to contribute what they discovered - I have found that nearly all points I wanted to make in a 50 minute lecture are brought up. I make heavy use of the board (or flip chart) to fill in points. At the end of class, I simply put up the outline I would have used for my lecture (PowerPt or overhead) and check off each point we discussed. It was "risky" for me to try this but it has worked great - it achieve immediate homework compliance and students who discovered that their articles were NOT research eagerly brought more appropriate research, usually to the next class (even though I did not ask them to do it). I learned a lot about the starting point of my students as we began the semester. This semester I plan to have the students write an essay - I like Denise's activity and I will probably try it AFTER doing "my" exercise. Susan St. John, Assoc. Professor of Sociology Corning Community College 1 Academic Drive Corning, NY 14830 (607) 962-9526 or secretary 962-9239 ----- Original Message ----- From: Denise Copelton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Monday, January 9, 2006 10:55 am Subject: TEACHSOC: Suggestions for accessible article > > Teach-Soc'ers: > > In my Intro class next semester I am assigning a paper > that requires students to "dissect" an academic > journal article. One of the goals is to help students > understand how to read journal articles, and also to > identify hypotheses, independent variables, dependent > variables, etc. I will use it early in the semester > when we discuss research methods. I used this > asignment last semester with much success, however, I > want to change the article I require them to dissect. > Last semester I used the following: > > Flynn, Clifton P. 1999. ?Exploring the Link between > Corporal Punishment and Children?s Cruelty to > Animals,? Journal of Marriage & Family 61:971-981. > > While this article worked very well, I want to use > something different this semester so that students > aren't able to "recycl e" assig
