TY - JOUR AU - Chen, Daowen PY - 2015/10/20 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Class Debate to Improve Class Participation Quality JF - TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology JA - TRAILS VL - IS - SE - DO - UR - https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/class-debate-to-improve-class-participation-quality SP - AB - Studies have found that it is important to encourage class participation due to its benefits for both instructors and students, and the pursuit of this has led to a lot of effective strategies to increase students’ class participation (Smith 1992; Fassinger 1995). Despite the many efforts, in an actual classroom, class participation can sometimes be of poor quality which is less meaningful and therefore can potentially reduce the efficiency of a class. Furthermore, one of the teaching goals in sociology classes is to train students to have "critical sociological thinking"—a higher-level cognitive ability "with a sensitivity and awareness of social and cultural contexts" (Grauerholz and Bouma-Holtrop 2003). Therefore, this resource attempts to provide a way to improve the number of students who participate in class and more importantly the quality of that class participation while applying key aspects of "critical sociological thinking." In this resource, I am proposing a class debate activity in an introductory sociology course. This activity will first intend to help students thoroughly understand the class material from a sociological perspective. More importantly, in this activity, students will practice active learning, cooperative learning and learn to develop critical thinking abilities which will help ameliorate the quality of class participation in the long run. In the meantime, this class activity will also allow students to develop their time management skills and their evaluation ability. Although this resource uses the "Human Societies" course as a focal example, the debate can be adapted to fit all levels of sociology classes in different class sizes. A debate topic which references the class material, uses social issues to relate to the class, and enables the students to think from various angles can be effective to use in a debate activity. The supporting literature of sociological teaching and learning will be examined as well. ER -