TEACHSOC: List of Sociology Journals

[Kathy Liddle]

I'm also in favor of having undergraduates read journal articles.  When I taught (adjunct) at a community college, I did it as an in-class exercise.  I divided them into small groups, gave each group a journal article, and had them work together to identify some of the key parts (e.g., research question, methods used, major findings).   I've also taught at two universities and assigned primarily sociological journal articles and book chapters for the readings.  I saw my graduate advisor teach this way with great success -- he would walk students through key points in class if it was a particularly difficult article and would occasionally put a statistical table up on the overhead to demystify the stats for them.   Now that I'm teaching my own classes, I still follow this model.  But, in addition, I now give students a set of study questions for each article.  It doesn't take me a tremendous amount of time to put them together, since I'm already familiar with the items I assign.  Essentially, the study questions walk them through the article and help them to catch the main signposts along the way.  (e.g., What two theories are the authors combining in their paper?  How do they explain ___?  What did their findings show regarding ____?)  If there are new terms defined in the reading assignment, I point those out and ask the students what they mean.  I also talk to them about how to read a statistical article if they don't know statistics yet -- explaining that they can skim or skip the detailed stats section for the time being and jump ahead to where the author explains what the findings actually were.  I also choose a lot of qualitative readings. The feedback has been good, despite the fact that students also say that the readings are harder than in most of their classes.  They like the study questions and my most recent classes said they really enjoyed the readings.   This is not to say that it's a perfect system by any means.  There are still students who take the study questions too literally -- I can tell on exams and in extra help sessions who really did the reading with the questions as a guide, and who tried to use the questions as a shortcut by skimming for key phrases and (often) taking them out of context.  This also becomes a problem on occasion when they form study groups on their own.  I know some of them divide up the readings among themselves, have each person do a set of study questions, and then exchange answers. I don't mind them studying together -- but when one student takes the "skim and copy" approach it hurts others in the group. Sorry to ramble on -- I'm new to the list and this is my first post.  I'll try to be more concise in the future.  :-) Kathy Liddle Assistant Professor of Sociology University of Toronto  1265 Military Trail Toronto, ON M1C 1A4  CANADA office phone: 416-287-7345 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Teaching Sociology" group. To post to this group, send email to teachsoc@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/teachsoc -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---