Given that so many college students take Introduction to Sociology or Social Problems or both, we wondered about the amount of content overlap in these courses. We designed a study that used content analysis of syllabi from these courses in order to measure the amount of convergence between the two classes. In our sample, nearly 70 percent of the…

This research is an initial investigation into the ways community-based learning increase the cognitive skills central to the exercise of the sociological imagination. In addition to identifying a means to reveal that learning had occurred, we looked for evidence that the students were mastering sociological content, especially the concepts and…

This article isolates and observes the impact of peer readership on low-stakes reflective writing assignments in two large Introduction to Sociology classes. Through a comparative content analysis of over 2,000 private reflective journal entries and semipublic reflective blog posts, I find that both practices produce distinct forms of reflection.…

Sociologists have long reflected on what should be taught in sociology. In recent years, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has produced several important publications on key principles and learning goals for the introductory course. However, little current work has systematically examined what peer-recognized leaders in the field…

The authors examined the crowd sections of 20 introduction to sociology textbooks, coding them for the presence of seven crowds myths--claims about crowds that have no empirical support and have been rejected by scholars in the field. The number of myths per book ranges from five to one. The authors conclude by making suggestions for rewriting…