This sounds like a wonderful assignment! It is also is a creative way to manage sharing results. I have done something similar by simply preparing a list of students' names and choosing them randomly. I sampled with replacement to illustrate the process and to make sure that students who had presented once were still "at risk" of being called on again.
Another issue to consider is how to make sure that the studens who are not presenting listen to those who are. To encourage this behavior, I chose three of the stats presented and gave the class a short quiz about them. I graded very leniently because some of the student presentations were not as clear as they could have been. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Teaching Sociology" <[email protected]> Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 05:56:20 -0800 Subject: TEACHSOC: Getting students to present research results in a large class We have our Introductory Sociology class of 150 students doing research papers for the first time and I was thinking of a way to get them to share their results with the rest of the class. They were all asked to examine the portrayal of one group in the mass media.They needed to prepare a code sheet, document their results, and explain the meaning of their findings using sociological concepts. If I go into class and ask 150 of them to share their results with the rest of the class they will just stare at me. So, I came up with an idea. I will ask each one of them to choose one significant statistic from their data which uses a number from 1-100. Then they will write out what that statistic means. For example 3 = the percentage of visible minority children appearing in TV advertising during children's Saturday morning cartoons. Then I will call out the numbers from 1-100 (either numerically or in random order) and whoever has that number as their significant statistic will stand up and read out their results and tell us something interesting about their research project. - Erin Steuter, Mount Allison University - Maxine P. Atkinson, Ph.D. Director, N.C. State's First Year Inquiry Seminar Program Division of Undergraduate Academic Programs, and Associate Professor of Sociology North Carolina State University email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: 919 515 9001
