Scholars have long praised the ways in which film can provide students with an opportunity for deep intellectual and emotional connections to classroom material. With contemporary technology, however, instructors are instead turning toward shorter audiovisual material that can be accessed with little preparation, take up less class time, and cater…

The undergraduate research assistantship is key in the professionalization of future sociologists. Our study is the first in the social sciences to document benefits and challenges from both faculty and student perspectives. By interviewing 13 undergraduate research assistants (RAs) and 10 faculty in sociology departments at primarily…

International travel has long been considered a key pedagogical strategy for global learning. Yet very little is known about whether study-abroad experiences increase students' awareness of the impact of tourism as a global phenomenon. In this study, we assessed students' learning through a content analysis of their journals and final essays from…

Maintaining class participation and engagement poses a unique challenge in teaching online courses at postsecondary institutions. With the distinctive rise of online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a critical need to develop innovative and exciting opportunities in online course concept learning, application, and peer-to-peer…

The learning outcome, "Students will learn to engage with and impact society," is common in curricular frameworks addressing undergraduate sociology education; however, it does not receive adequate coverage compared to other competencies. The lack of attention to this outcome coupled with the tendency to focus heavily on social problems…

Advanced undergraduate students struggle with executing complete research projects that involve data collection and analysis. Research indicates that engaging in undergraduate research is a high-impact practice. The American Sociological Association recommends that sociology majors engage in research beyond their research methods and statistics…

The COVID-19 pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated many enduring social inequalities in countries throughout the world. Sociology instructors are thus likely to incorporate content related to this relationship between the pandemic and inequalities in their courses. This article explores the potential of horror films, specifically the subgenre…

A common learning goal of law-related courses taught in sociology classrooms is for students to gain an understanding of the sociological approach to law. This approach emphasizes viewing law as a social process and studying law by analyzing both legal and nonlegal phenomena. A challenge to students' achievement of this learning goal is their…

This article details an exercise for the first day of class in an introductory sociology course. Students in two sections of Introduction to Sociology taught by the same professor and covering the same content, with the exception of the exercise on the first day of class, were surveyed at the end of the semester regarding the first day. Student…

Efforts are underway to globalize sociology in the United States through study abroad experiences. At the same time, there is a push to extend the reach of such programs to students of color. We use student journal entries and fieldnotes from trips to South Africa to analyze how students of color grapple with a disruption of identity in a Black…

Service learning (SL) is growing in our universities and in Spain. However, still much action and research are needed with a gender perspective. This article aims to evaluate an SL project that consisted of workshops in schools on gender and technology. We evaluated the experience with a mixed-methods approach and a gender perspective. This…

Teaching race and ethnicity in various sociology courses, we found students in our classes can be very reluctant to approach the subject of race, discrimination, and racism. Moreover, during class discussion, they often have a hard time defining and analyzing these concepts. In this study, we examine how popular culture can be a useful tool to…

Scholars of teaching and learning in sociology have argued that introductory courses should teach toward foundational learning goals instead of providing an exhaustive review of the discipline. Nevertheless, prior research has provided far more guidance on what instructors ought to teach than how they can cohesively support learning across the…

Mastery learning approaches were designed to improve student learning and elevate the level of understanding across a broader swath of students. These approaches operate under the belief that all students are capable of learning if given enough time. Little research has examined the utility or applicability of a mastery learning approach for…

Previous scholarship has demonstrated the value of high-impact practices of community engagement, inquiry-based pedagogy, and collaborative learning for engagement and learning in sociology courses, especially undergraduate research methods and statistics. This article explores the changes made to an upper-division undergraduate course focused on…