This article presents an in-class exercise that teaches students how to call elected officials about a course-related issue of their choice. The goals are to connect classroom learning with real-life action, to show that contacting elected officials need not be difficult or intimidating, and to help students develop a sense of efficacy that can…

Recent research has called on scholars to develop pedagogical interventions to address issues of media literacy. This teaching note answers that call by describing a media literacy project designed for use in social problems classes. The project acquaints students to the constructionist approach to social problems and the method of content…

Two common ways that instructors assess participation in sociology courses are recalling participation by memory or counting times spoken during class in real time. However, these common assessments rely on faulty assumptions that do not support their usage. This article reconceptualizes participation grading as an opportunity to motivate skill…

Impacts of incorporating active learning pedagogies into a lecture-based course were examined among 266 students across nine research methods course sections taught by one instructor at a large public university. Pedagogies evaluated include lecture only, lecture with small group discussions, and lecture with simulations. Although…

The role of extra credit in the college classroom has been examined as a philosophical and pedagogical issue, but in this project, we argue that the matter of extra credit is also a sociological one. Using survey data, we examine how college instructors' status and individual demographic characteristics are related to the use of extra credit. We…

Service sociology is a critical strategy for teaching and learning in sociology. Even beyond that, service sociology is an imperative for communicating the value of our discipline to our students and other constituents. Using data collected from faculty members in Minnesota colleges and universities, I describe the salience of the sociology…

To what extent, and why, do social science undergraduates experience anxiety about taking statistics courses? Despite holding assumptions of rampant statistics anxiety among students, sociologists have conducted few empirical studies of this issue. We extend the literature by analyzing data from a survey of sociology, social work, and criminal…

This article demonstrates a method for teaching students to conduct audit studies of discrimination. The assignment can be used in courses on quantitative methods, race, gender, or other topics. Audit studies test for unequal treatment by having otherwise identical pairs of people who vary on a single trait, such as race or gender, apply for the…

Scholars have long emphasized the importance of teacher training in higher education, including in sociology. Such calls have led to modest improvements in opportunities for graduate students to develop teaching-related skills and experience. However, many of these opportunities are not specific to sociology and may lack a teaching component. In…

Over 50 years ago, Stanley Milgram and colleagues published a short article detailing an unobtrusive experimental design they called the lost-letter technique. The technique involves placing stamped, unmailed letters in a community and using the relative rate of return to infer local attitudes toward political issues and social groups.…

This teaching note describes the design and implementation of an activity in a 90-minute teaching session that was developed to introduce a diverse cohort of first-year criminology and sociology students to the use of documents as sources of data. This approach was contextualized in real-world research through scaffolded, student-centered tasks…

This article presents information about the planning, implementation, and findings of an assessment-based student portfolio designed by the faculty of a sociology program at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, a midsized public regional liberal arts institution. First, we briefly present the rationale for implementing a portfolio system and the…

Methods textbooks play a role in socializing a new generation of researchers about ethical research. How do undergraduate social research methods textbooks portray harm, its prevalence, and ways to mitigate harm to participants? We conducted a content analysis of ethics chapters in the 18 highest-selling undergraduate textbooks used in sociology…

Thirty years ago, Hubert M. Blalock Jr. published an article in "Teaching Sociology" about the importance of teaching statistics. We honor Blalock's legacy by assessing how using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in statistics classes can enhance student learning and increase statistical literacy among social science gradaute students. In…

This article addresses a challenge for sociologists who teach at institutions located in unfamiliar cultural contexts through a photo elicitation project to develop students' sociological imaginations while teaching the instructor about students' social contexts. In introductory courses, we must present sociology as a field of study that is…