My teaching goals are (1) to take steps towards more systematically assessing the effectiveness of my teaching; (2) to take steps to more systematically lead my students to “think like sociologists/criminologists”; and (3) to improve my program analysis assignment.
I’ve done a small, informal assessment of my teaching effectiveness by conducting a pre-and post-test in several of my courses. The documented improvement in student knowledge on delinquency, child maltreatment and criminal justice ranges from 25% to 57%. This is a nice easy way to evaluate my teaching, but this method doesn’t get at any specific feature of the course and that is a much more practical piece of information than an overall improvement rate
I have a proposed classroom research prospectus that I designed as part of a graduate level course on classroom assessment and I would like to implement it in the near future. The goal is to figure out how I can best motivate my students to come prepared to class, so we can use class time to discuss, analyze and debate issues related to crime and justice. The major question I hope to answer is as follows: Are multimedia homework assignments equally valid ways to get students to come prepared to adequately participate in discussions and activities? The proposed data collection method is a modified minute paper technique because it’s easy to implement and easily adaptable to both small and large classrooms.
My second goal is to encourage my students to think like sociologists/criminologists. I already have in-class exercises and discussions that get at this, but I want to be more systematic and purposeful in developing this skill. For example, I have my students do a key statistics assignment for homework where they are asked to search and report several descriptive statistics regarding childhood victimization and juvenile crime and delinquency. We review the answers in class where I ask them to think through the statistics they found and try to figure out the “back-story”. In other words, the explanation for the pattern of crime summarized in the homework assignment, which gets us to explore the correlates of crime is a very practical way. They are also asked if and what other type of information they need in order to make sense of the data, which gets at differentiating between incidence rates, ratios, and under/over representation.
I also notice the difficulty some students face when asked to think beyond being students who are strictly perceived as consumers of data as opposed to producers of knowledge. I want to work on designing my Criminology course to go beyond getting students to understand the different criminological theories and what the research says about their empirical validity, towards having them design and conduct the research questions that will allow them to test the theories’ validity themselves. I understand this might be most appropriate for an upper level (and perhaps a graduate level course), but I also believe this can be incorporated into the curriculum as a special topics course, an independent study, or an honors project.
I already have a couple of ways in which I try to get at this, but they are very much preliminary. For example, in order to get them to see themselves as capable of producing knowledge or capable of addressing a social issue, I often promote them to graduate students who have to put together a proposal, a police chief or mayor who has to address several issues in a local police department, a senator looking to propose a new law or policy, or a social worker that has to make a decision about placement.
My third and last goal is to modify a program analysis assignment I have used in the past, so that the students can truly reap the benefits of this exercise. I’ve always thought this was a really useful assignment but wasn’t quite working. First, it was the last paper in a lower level course that was really demanding and perhaps beyond what they were able to do. I was really dissatisfied with the results but had no real way to help them improve on it.
I decided the assignment was better suited for an upper level course and restructured it, so it was a presentation that the students presented in-class throughout the semester. This gave me multiple opportunities to provide feedback and gave the students repeated exposure to an exercise I considered very valuable (speaking in public). Overall, it was better, but I was still not convinced it was “working” the way I envisioned it.
I decided they needed more instruction in order to do well in this assignment, particularly as it relates to criminological theory (because it’s all about applying theory to a real-world program or intervention). So now, I’m doing this assignment in a course that focuses almost exclusively on understanding, evaluating and applying criminological theories (as opposed to covering theory in two class sessions like I’ve done in the past). I’ve also split the assignment into three parts: research, presentation, and paper. They have to get familiar with the program of their choosing (research). They have to do a presentation where they receive immediate feedback from their classmates and myself (presentation). Lastly, they have to write a short, collaborative paper incorporating the feedback they received. This has yet to be implemented, but I look forward to seeing if these modifications make a difference.
