A few thoughts on revising research methods

Last Updated on January 8, 2018 by

Sociology_Revision_Surveys

Here’s a general plan of how I tend to revise each research method with my students, for A level sociology, focussing on social surveys revision.

The link above is to the section of the revision hand-out I use (working through it should take about an hour).

I use very similar looking material, and pretty much the same structure (with slight modifications) for all the other research methods.

As far as I’m concerned the important tasks are in bold, the rest is just fluff to get students’ attention/ deal with those who have short attention spans.

  1. Q/A starter 1 – provide an example of the results of a social survey – what does it tell us and what are the limitations….? I quite like to introduce something new here.
  2. PPT  starter 2 – Recap the key terms and examples of social surveys – I quickly PPT over the basics of social surveys – just the definition and examples (the ones the students haven’t managed to remember themselves!)
  3. Individual task – Basic true/ false grid (statements to do with social surveys). Sometimes I’ll make this into a Kahoot or a Socrative task
  4. Student task – Strengths and limitations evaluation grids – students can basically use the answers from the true false grids – getting them to evaluate the strengths and limitations pushes them a bit further. For some topics, I’ll make this a cut and paste sentence sort.
  5. Teacher feedback – I give selected examples of how, for example, random sampling might undermine the representativeness (usually a strength) of a survey.
  6. Q/A – Applying social surveys to researching topics in education – students select on of 8-10 key research methods topics we look at and plan and develop their thoughts on how they might use surveys to research that topic
  7. Student task – exam SAQ or essay practice – it is what it is, exam practice, which I may or may not mark! For some topics this will be a marking exercise.

It’s pretty dry, but then again it’s revision – enough fun and games already, let the exam fear commence…

 

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