Social Problems Course Research Articles

Gaining Ground: Toward the Development of Critical Thinking Skills in a Social Problems Course

Gaining Ground: Toward the Development of Critical Thinking Skills in a Social Problems Course

Improving Metacognitive Ability Through The Reading Questioning Answering (RQA) Model Assisted With Learning Journals in Nonformal Educational Study Programs

The important skills identified by UNESCO for the 21st century remain related to the four pillars of education, including: 1) learning to find out, 2) learning to do, 3) learning to be personal), an 4) learning to live together in peace (learning to live together in peace). One of the skills that must be empowered through the learning process in higher education is metacognitive skills. The aim of this research is to increase metacognitive abilities through the Reading Questioning Answering (RQA) model assisted by learning journals in social and development problems courses." This research method is a quasi-experimental type. The results of research on the influence of the RQA (Reading Questioning and Answering) model assisted by learning journals on students' metacognitive abilities in learning social and development issues, it can be concluded that there is an influence of the RQA (Reading Questioning and Answering) learning model assisted by learning journals on students' metacognitive learning outcomes with Gain score analysis shows that there is a significant difference in the Gain Score percentage. The difference in the percentage value of the gain score obtained from the two. The control group got a percentage of 10% in the ineffective category. Meanwhile, the experimental group had a G-Score percentage of 60% in the quite effective category. The results of implementing learning with RQA assisted by learning journals are effective in improving students' metacognitive skills

On new ground: Assessment strategies for critical thinking skills as the learning outcome in a social problems course

AbstractThis chapter describes assessment strategies as applied through a course redesign in an undergraduate Social Problems course that features local, national, and international topics. The alignment between the assessment strategies used in this course and the pedagogical improvements implemented is intentionally directed at the development of students’ critical thinking skills. In particular, these assessment strategies infuse and scaffold opportunities for developing critical thinking skills throughout the entire course.

From Doers to Donors:Sociology Students’ Perceptions of Experiential Philanthropy

ABSTRACT Service learning is a well-established part of the sociology curriculum in many American universities and colleges. Less well known is student-led philanthropy (also known as experiential philanthropy), a form of service learning that encourages students to donate money to the community partners they are serving. Underwritten by national foundations or regional Campus Compacts, student-led philanthropy (SLP) positions undergraduates as donors as well as doers. In this paper, we ask how sociology students perceive the role of donor and how it enhances or detracts from their volunteer experiences with community partners. To answer this question, we draw on qualitative and quantitative data from 24 SLP students enrolled in an Honors Social Problems course. We find that students overwhelmingly welcome the shift from doer to donor in so much as it affords them a greater perceived sense of purpose and impact, enriching their relationships with community partners. Students lament being donors, however, when they have to collectively decide which organizations “deserve” funding. The award process is especially fraught when organizations become maligned and deemed unworthy by a subset of students. We conclude with a discussion of how SLP can be integrated into the sociology classroom and how instructors might pursue this form of service learning when resources for philanthropic giving are limited.

Changing Students’ Perceptions of Inequality?

Budget exercises are frequently used in introductory and social problems courses to facilitate student understanding of income inequality. But do these exercises actually lead to greater sociological understanding? To explore this issue, the authors studied undergraduate students enrolled in introductory sociology courses during the 2008-2009 academic year. Using a unique pretest-pretest-posttest design, the authors captured student perceptions of issues of socioeconomic inequality at the beginning of the course, after completion of a traditional unit on stratification, and after participation in a budget exercise. The unique study design allows the authors to examine if and how students make gains in understanding inequality sociologically. They also consider other learning objectives, including fostering an appreciation of obstacles to social mobility and increasing general knowledge about inequality. The results suggest that both budget exercises and a traditional pedagogical unit of lecture, reading, and discussion play limited roles in fostering at least short-term sociological understanding as related to these goals.

Real Problems, Virtual Solutions: Engaging Students Online

In this article, the author explains how she used online blogs with more than 263 students over a period of four semesters in an introductory social problems course. She describes how she uses blogs to enhance student participation, engagement, and skill building. Finally, she provides an overview of students’ qualitative assessments of the blog assignments, highlighting the drawbacks and limitations of integrating technology and, in particular, blogs as a course writing requirement.

Engaging Our Students

This volume is a collection of essays previ ously published in the sociological magazine, Contexts, that have been repackaged as a reader for an undergraduate audience. From those published in during its first five years (2002-2006), past edi tors Jeff Goodwin and James Jasper selected those they believe provide insight into a wide range of sociological issues. The result is a highly readable and engaging reader that is likely to prove popular with undergraduate sociology students and instructors. The reader is organized into 14 topic areas: Self and Community; Families; Education and Youth; Culture and Media; Poverty and Inequality; Work and the Economy; Gender and Sexualities; Race and Ethnicity; Religion; Medicine and Health; Crime and Deviance; Politics; Environment; and Methods. Each sec tion contains four to six short essays that address interesting sociological questions (e.g., Andrew Cherlin's essay on whether the government should promote marriage), pro vide reflections on key sociological concepts (e.g., Robert Zussman's essay on the self or Joseph Gusfield's on culture), or shed light on core sociological issues (e.g., job discrimina tion and nontraditional families). Given the range and breadth of topics covered, the reader would be highly appropriate for intro ductory sociology or social problems courses; instructors in more substantive courses are likely to find it too limited. Because it can be a challenge to get stu dents to read assigned materials, a key ques tion I had as I reviewed this volume is whether students are likely to actually read it. Frankly, if students can't bring themselves to read these essays, I doubt any other reader could do so. As Goodwin and Jasper note in the preface to The Reader, Contexts has proved popular for classroom use, as its are more lively and pointed than text book summaries but more readable and less technical than scholarly journal articles (p. ix). Like those published in Contexts, the essays here are short (about six pages), well written, and the topics compelling. From an undergraduate's perspective, some of the top The Reader, edited by Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 515pp. $37.50 cloth. ISBN: 9780393929898.

Providing a Context for Service Learning: The “Focused” Social Problems Course

Providing a Context for Service Learning: The “Focused” Social Problems Course

Analyzing the News: Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in a Writing Intensive Social Problems Course

Sociologists have long used current news items in the classroom to illustrate concepts and pique student's interests. Carefully selected news segments offer interesting stories that engage students while simultaneously providing intellectual simulation, particularly for contemprary social problems courses. Students were better able to recognize sociology's relevance to everyday life when their assignments included analyzing news reports. The daily newspaper reading combined with regular journal assignments forces students become active learners, setting the stage for analytical and critical thinking skills to develop.

When Religion Becomes Deviance: Introducing Religion in Deviance and Social Problems Courses

Sociologists have maintained an interest in fringe religion at least since the well-known research by John Lofland and Rodney Stark (1965) on the early years of the Unification church in this country. Fringe religions, often referred to as new religious movements (NRMs) or cults, are a fascinating and theoretically insightful form of deviant behavior. The connection between religion and deviance has not been lost on sociologists, and there is an important literature that considers religion as deviant behavior (e.g., Brornley and Shupe 1993; Dawson 1996; Miller 1995; Neitz and Goldman 1995). For the most part, however, those who have studied deviant religions have identified themselves as sociologists of religion rather than as deviance theorists, and their books and articles have primarily been written for and read by sociologists of religion. As a result, sociologists discuss religion as deviance in sociology of religion courses but not in deviance courses or social problems courses. A review of the content of deviance journals and courses, in fact, revealed no religion articles in the journal Deviant Behavior from 1979 to 1994 (Bader, Becker, and Desmond 1996). Only one deviance textbook, furthermore, includes a chapter on the topic (Ward, Carter, and Perrin 1994). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate just how logically and neatly the study of NRMs fits theoretical frameworks in the sociology of deviance and social problems, as well as to point deviance scholars and teachers to religion literature relevant to their courses. While some have suggested that religion should be discussed in deviance courses (e.g., Bader et al. 1996), and others have suggested that deviance courses should focus on deviant groups, including NRMs (Smith 1996), most teachers and scholars have paid little attention to how religion should be presented in a deviance course. This paper attempts to do just that.

BAC and Beer: Operationalizing Drunk Driving Laws in a Research Methods Course Exercise

The exercise illustrated in a concrete way that current per se laws intended to deter drunk driving are inherently vague even though legally clear. These vagaries appeared in the wide range of resulting BAC levels-levels that control for weight and sex-resulting from students' estimates of the number of beers needed to get to a BAC level of 10 percent, the legal standard for DUI in most states, including the three states surrounding the campus. The pedagogical points of the exercise in a research methods context are that: it illustrates the process of operationalizing a construct in a policy-relevant context that is also familiar to the students; it shows uncertainty may continue to surround such an operationalization, even when the indicator agreed upon was intended as a policy improvement over an earlier approach; and it suggests these methodological issues may have significant social implications for how society thinks about responding to the problem. The exercise is potentially applicable to statistics or social problems courses

Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems.

The international group of sociological and nutritional scientists in this volume represent the research that has been conducted on the social problematics of food and nutrition in such areas as food safety, biotechnology, food stamp programs, obesity, anorexia nervosa, and vegetarianism. The broad range of topics addressed and the case studies examined make this book suitable as a course-related text both in foodways and cultural aspects of nutrition and as a new departure in social problems courses.

Citation Challenges: Building Credibility for Threatening Ideas

This paper describes an exercise in citation verification that took place in a lower-level social problems course at the University of California at Davis in fall 1989. The exercise was not planned in the course preparation, but was initiated in mid-quarter in response to a challenge to a particular text by an individual student. The results were most gratifying. As designed, the course examined several broad social problems (e.g., political and economic inequality, crime, environmental threats, chauvinism) from a power-conflict perspective, with three primary objectives: first, to show students the nature and importance of values and value conflicts in defining social problems; second, to help students to understand social problems as manifestations of competition between identifiable vested and nonvested interests; and third, to develop in students a critical attitude towards information and its sources. The course met three times weekly: meetings consisted of two fullclass lectures containing 100-plus students and one much smaller discussion section led by one of three teaching assistants. The text subject to challenge was Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media by Michael Parenti. It was used in conjunction with America's Problems: Social Issues and Public Policy by Elliot Currie and Jerome Skolnick. Numerous current selections from the mass media were examined and criticized throughout the course as well. Inventing Reality provides a compelling analysis of pro-business and pro-government selectivity and bias on the part of what the author defines as the mainstream media: a list of influential print and electronic outlets which includes the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major weekly news magazines, the three national television networks, and other media. A frank Marxist, Parenti employs more than 600 footnotes in 13 chapters to document concentration of ownership, undue in-

The Poverty Game: A Computer-Based Learning Package for Exploring Poverty and Public Policy

The following is a description of a computerbased learning package that I have created. I designed the package to fill a gap in available commercial software, namely my need to acquaint introductory sociology students with some of the concepts and controversies surrounding the social problem of poverty in the United States and with public policies designed to reduce that problem. The study of poverty and public policy is one component of the study of inequality in my Introduction to Sociology course. In their study of stratification, students are introduced to the concept of class in the United States, with additional attention to the low end of the class-based stratification hierarchy. A major goal of the software is to increase students' awareness of the tradeoffs involved in poverty policy implementation, either in terms of structural aspects of the economy or in terms of the beneficiary group. This goal also makes the software appropriate for stratification or social problems courses. The software package is called THE POVERTY GAME, and usually can be played several times within a 50-minute class session. Successive plays of the game will take less time as the students become more familiar with the choices available in each decision frame. Because instructions for the exercise are contained within the software, students also can use the material as an out-of

Software Reviews : CHIPENDALE and AMERICAN SOCIAL PROBLEMS: INTRODUCTION TO CHIPENDALE

The basic premise is that it is more interesting and exciting to do sociology than it is to read or hear about it. The package's approach makes it well suited as a self-teaching supplement to social problems courses, although it assumes basic computer literacy (e.g., how to boot a disk, how to use the keyboard). It is extremely user-friendly and the workbook is carefully and clearly written. Students receive a relatively painless introduction to cross-tabular analysis of survey data and to the use of computers.

Education for Survival: Using Films to Teach War as a Social Problem

War and the high cost of war preparations are two of humanity's greatest social problems, but many sociologists avoid these topics in their introductory courses. Reasons include the lack of professional reward for addressing these topics and for reworking finished courses, a fear of negative feedback, and a reluctance to increase students' anxiety without offering a means of personal empowerment. Structuring the presentation of war and peace topics around films and other audiovisual resources is an effective way of overcoming these barriers. This paper presents several arguments and strategies for the use of films on war and peace in introductory and social problems courses. It also addresses the practical problems of cost, scheduling, and locating appropriate resources. An appendix provides an annotated list of effective films, videos, and slide shows.

Teaching Social Gerontology

T he field of social gerontology has several characteristics that make the teaching of a course a challenging task. The field is relatively new, draws on a diverse set of disciplines, and encompasses a wide range of topics, issues, and methods. Like many new fields of study, social gerontology suffers from a plethora of small cross-sectional and descriptive studies and paucity of research that adequately addresses causal relationships. Finally, there is a need for the development and refinement of theoretical perspectives that can be tested and used to interpret research findings. Often when instructors contend with these limitations of the field they create a course that consists of an apparent hodge podge of facts and figures that lack a unifying context or they create a social problems course that focuses on the elderly. Neither of these options provides students with a clear picture of the field of social gerontology. To avoid the creation of such unwieldy courses, an instructor needs to resolve several issues pertaining to course design and teaching techniques. These issues include decisions about the course objectives, course content, texts and supporting materials, classroom procedures and teaching models, and assignments and outside activities.

Teaching Rational Thinking in the Social Problems Course

During most of the twentieth century in most sociology departments the social problems course has been one of the basics of the discipline. Social problems is a bread and butter course offered to undergraduates who often have no long-range commitment to sociology as a field of professional study. It has never enjoyed academic stature (Mills, 1943). In the 1890s, Harvard professor Francis Peabody taught a social problems course nicknamed by his students Peabo's drainage, drunkenness, and divorce; more recently a critic has labeled the course nuts, sluts, and perverts (Liazos, 1972). The social problems course rarely provides a cumulative knowledge base for the remaining sociology curriculum, yet it continues to be popular.

Benign Disruption in the Classroom: A Case Study

The college classroom provides a unique opportunity for fieldwork (Hughes, 1970). This routine workplace of desks and chairs can be transformed into a research arena for analyzing the social processes of teaching and learning. This article describes an episode in which the classroom becomes an outpost for observing subtle ways of transmitting and receiving academic knowledge. By experimenting with the reading and writing requirements of a social problems course, I learned much about the normative structure of sociology classrooms. This descriptive

Methodological Note on Measuring Selection in Differential Migration

polemics and rhetoric in sociology, particularly in social problems courses. E. Concepts as vehicles for wish projection. Finally, the concepts which have ego-involvement for a particular individual are sometimes the vehicles for wish projection. This is particularly manifest when a student or scholar presents a verbalconceptual picture of what he observes or predicts consistent with his own ideals and wishes. In many instances, it is not naive subjectivity, for it may occur in the works of the erudite (e.g., Arnold Toynbee, Karl Marx) who are quite adept with high level abstractions. This type of conceptual fault lies at the heart of the genetics controversy in Soviet Russia and is the basis of Lysenko's position. IV