University examinations categorise students according to their individual achievements determined by teaching staff. This procedure serves the elicitation and certification of student knowledge and thus reproduces academic hierarchies. Drawing on empirical evidence from ethnographic fieldwork in Engineering and History departments, this article…

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…

This article investigates the effects of teaching about metacognition in a sociological theory course. I created a series of teaching interventions to introduce students to the science of learning, including an interactive lecture on metacognition, a discussion that models metacognitive strategies, and activities for students to practice…

To respond to needs arising from the field and institutional constrictions, various video-integrated teaching methods were offered to students in multiparticipant courses. Two hundred ninety-five students studying in two Sociology of Education courses agreed to participate in the research. One hundred sixty-two students participated in Course 1,…

Relevant in many academic contexts, recent scholarship in sociology has challenged departments to improve the public face of the discipline through introductory classes. However, this scholarship has not addressed how departments can improve the discipline's public face while maintaining student performance. It is one thing to create an engaging…

In this article I examine the role of the contemporary university in light of the mass increase in class sizes that has occurred on an international scale. While we may look nostalgically back to a time when lectures numbered a few hundred students and tutorials had as few as ten, massification at undergraduate level is an inescapable fact of…

Lecturing has been criticized for fostering a passive learning environment, emphasizing a one-way flow of information, and not adequately engaging students. In contrast, active-learning approaches, such as team-based learning (TBL), prioritize student interaction and engagement and create multidirectional flows of information. This paper presents…

This study reexamined PowerPoint's potential to enhance traditional pedagogical practices in higher education. The study addressed (1) the conditions under which PowerPoint meets students' needs in typical lecture-based classrooms, (2) whether professors consider PowerPoint-based lectures more effective than lectures supported by material on…

Instructors of large, general education lecture courses face a number of student engagement and learning challenges. In this article, we develop and assess an interactive lecture that introduces a theoretical perspective and three related concepts to two introductory sociology general education classrooms (n = 433). This interactive lecture…

In this paper, I present the findings of a self-study into my teaching practices as a sociology-of-education lecturer working in the pre-service teacher education programme of a regional university in New South Wales, Australia. The principal data source is a logbook of the teaching practices which characterised several tutorial classes taught in…

This publication contains excerpts from published works on the teaching of undergraduate sociology by sociologists known for their contribution to scholarship. In addition to bringing these writings to a broader audience, the series is a reminder that the creation of sociological knowledge and its transmission have been joint concerns of many…

Although many of us would like to get beyond lecturing, we often lack concrete strategies for doing so, particularly in our larger classes. This paper suggests one such strategy for creating a discussion-based course. The success of such a course is predicated on students reading and thinking about the course material (receiving "first exposure")…

An Introductory Sociology class enrolling up to 1,000 students per semester was the group used in this experiment to discover empirically validated means of teaching the mass class with both emotional satisfaction to students and pedagogical efficiency. The course was conducted in lecture-discussion style with two lectures and one discussion…

The problem of extremely large introductory sociology classes is solved by a combination lecture-discussion method in which basic social processes are generated and experienced by the student. General objectives, basic procedures, and rules are outlined; results are discussed. (KM)

The possible difference in the performance on a mid-term and final exam between students taking a quasi-individualized mastery method of instruction and students having traditional lecture-discussion instruction was studied. A second issue examined was the difference between the proportion of students expressing a preference for one method of…