Research Methods, Second Time Around

The thing that stands out about the vast majority of my sociology students is that they roll their eyes at numbers. That’s a problem when you are trying to teach quantitative methods. The other major problem I often... [ view full abstract ]

The thing that stands out about the vast majority of my sociology students is that they roll their eyes at numbers. That’s a problem when you are trying to teach quantitative methods. The other major problem I often encounter is that students will not ask questions when they don’t understand material. I teach this upper-level class every semester and have taught it for over ten years. In many past semesters, all students passed the course, but increasingly some students need to repeat the class. The course has two group observation exercises, one inductive and one deductive. The problem that I’ve encountered when I have both repeating and new students together is that new students turn to the repeaters to lead their groups for the observation assignments, while never thinking about the fact that these students are repeating the class because they did not successfully complete it the first time. Beginning two years ago, I created separate groups for new students and repeating students and that helped somewhat, but in the fall 2015 semester, nine of 22 students needed to repeat the class. That was just too many second-timers to mix with new students. Thus, I created my second-time-around strategy.