Displaying Sociological Imagination assesses ideas, concepts, and ways of thinking presented in your Introduction to Sociology course. This assessment design provides a method of evaluating learning in all sociology courses without regard for the particular perspective or pedagogy of individual instructors.

Displaying Sociological Imagination is a two-step process in which students (1) view a video clip or read an assigned article, and (2) summarize and analyze the video or article using sociological ideas, concepts, theory and vocabulary. Students demonstrate their sociological knowledge by writing answers to four questions.

The following points summarize this procedure:

Displaying Sociological Imagination should be used at least once during the final two weeks of the quarter. Some faculty prefer to use it twice, once around mid-term and once in the final two weeks. A faculty member’s comments provide students with valuable feedback on their sociological development.

Displaying Sociological Imagination allows sociology faculty to assess the extent to which students collectively are learning material which the faculty considers important to a liberal arts education. The faculty believe that this assessment design and process is relatively free of testing errors.

Displaying Sociological Imagination involves the following steps:

1. First, each instructor chooses printed materials or a video segment. This stimuli should not have been previously used in the sociology courses and, with rare exception, should be new to each student. (Enclosed are several examples of articles from popular sources. Video segments may come from media sources such as CNN and 20/20 or from the packaged videos distributed by publishers and sometimes available from the division office.)
2. The stimuli is presented (in the case of a longer reading it may also be read as an assignment) and students are asked to answer the four questions presented on the assessment form (attached). A faculty member may introduce the general focus of the questions (summarize, use vocabulary in classification of observations, utilize one theory to analyze, utilize a different theory) but should not discuss the stimuli before students write their answers.
3. Collect the responses and forward completed Displaying Sociological Imagination forms to the Liberal Arts Division office. Faculty teaching at local and regional centers may pass the forms to their site coordinators. Since feedback to students is an important part of instruction, we suggest that faculty make copies of all forms which may then be evaluated by each faculty and returned to students; please submit the originals for assessment.

2. VOCABULARY: Demonstrate use (application) of sociological terms and vocabulary to describe, and/or comment on the social context of an episode, issue:

3. THEORY: Demonstrate application of sociological theory in identifying and analyzing relationships among elements in a social context:

4. ACCURACY: Demonstrate appropriate and accurate application of sociological ideas, concepts, vocabulary, and theory in describing, identifying and analyzing relationships among elements in a social context: