Cross Course Collaboration in Undergraduate Sociology Programs

In this article, the authors describe a cross course collaborative research project designed to provide students with an opportunity to integrate aspects of sociological study that are typically addressed in a compartmentalized course by course manner. They used this approach on two separate occasions. The first involved collaboration between a methods and a social statistics course. After evaluating this "pilot" project, a second collaboration added a social theory course to the methods and statistics combination, thus "closing the loop" between theoretical development and empirical testing. While "core" courses were used in these cases, the general collaborative model is applicable to many other course combinations. In each of these cases, students and the instructors collaborated on the development and implementation of a sociological research project. Students in each of the classes assumed primary responsibility for the aspect of the project directly related to the course in which they were enrolled (i.e., theory students developed hypotheses and theoretical interpretations of findings, methods students operationalized variables and gathered data, and statistics students conducted quantitative analysis). While students from each of the classes divided the labor and focused on one aspect of the project, each class was kept abreast of the project's development throughout the semester. The entire project was collectively reviewed in a final session. The central goals throughout were to engage students in a fully developed original research project, while integrating sociology courses in a way that presented a more coherent picture of the discipline. The authors first describe the initial two-course collaboration and the insights derived from that experience. Next they review the three-course collaboration and how it improved upon the initial model. Finally they offer an evaluation of both the outcomes and the process of conducting the collaboration. Since the focus of this article is the process of collaboration, the methods and evaluation center less on the research project itself, and more on the efforts to combine courses, co-teach, and create cohesion between three core courses. In addition, the authors provide an empirical evaluation of this process verifying the advantages of this type of approach. (Contains 2 footnotes.)