TEACHSOC: RE: original inquiry in the first course

[Roberts, Keith]

Greetings:   I'm eager to find out wht your views are on assigning *empirical* research projects to students in the Introductory Class. I know some who do. On the other hand, some contend that FIRST students need to gain at least a cursory knowledge of the basic concepts, theoretical perspectives and most important research methods BEFORE they conduct any empirical research. Once students have the Intro Course under their belt THEN they would be in a better position to engage in mini empirical research projects.     We now have some aspect of original inquiry right from the very first course.  These are obviously not highly complex or deeply sophisticated projects, but some form of original inquiry is required in all of our Gen Ed courses on this campus.  The rationale is largely to set the stage for a “culture of inquiry” as part of what the scholarly life is all about, but more than that it is so students get some sense of what is considered “evidence” in a social science as opposed to some other discipline.  We had found that students often finish a first course and still have highly a unsophisticated epistemology, yet developing a more sophisticated epistemology is at the core of “deep learning.”  Students just do not have much sense of how we know something in sociology, and the solution is not to bore them with more detailed reading on a wide range of research methods.  Instead, we try to give them some sense of one methodology in a first course and to get their feet wet using it at a basic level.  Because it involves active learning and the creation of knowledge, the students seem to really like it.  This requirement has only been in place for two years, so we do not have a lot of hard data on how it is working, but that is our approach.   Keith