Syllabus 📖

You can download the course syllabus.

SSCI 299: Thinking Like a Social Scientist

Spring 2022

Meeting Days/Times: All-Remote Instruction (until February 11th)

Instructor

Dr. Bryan Burton

Email: bryan.burton@sonoma.edu

Office Phone: 707-664-3675

Meeting Times: MoWe 4:00PM - 5:15PM Online Class (until February 11^th)

MoWe 4:00PM - 5:15PM Modular Unit 17B-101 (after February 11^th- Subject to Change)

Office Hours: Tuesday 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM, Please email me for appointments (Via Zoom)

Zoom Office Hours Join URL: Zoom Link

Course Description

A meta-disciplinary approach to social science literacy for second-year students, developing knowledge of themselves as individuals and applying that knowledge as active, engaged citizens. Students learn to ask questions, consider evidence, analyze data, and recognize theories and methods used by social scientists, as well as to explore their own individual direction for majors and career.

Course Learning Objectives

By the end of the semester, students will be able to:

Articulate how social scientists gather and evaluate information and use social science techniques to investigate questions about human individual and social behavior, past and present.
Apply social science habits of mind and methods to develop a research proposal.
Describe and apply teamwork skills as you develop your research project.
Discuss social science research on college success, particularly for sophomores and transfers, and use it to create a more meaningful and coherent story of your learning.

Evaluation and Grading

The assignments for this class are half focused on having a Successful Year and half focused on Social Science (although we will regularly bring the two approaches together). The “Individual Path” assignments are things like reflections on the stages of your own Successful Year, and the “Community Path” Successful Year assignments are things that are aimed at improving your collaboration with your peers. On the Social Science side of the class, the “Find the Social Science” work emphasizes social science literacy skills, whereas the “Project Proposal” is about applying those skills in your own investigation.

There are a number of different kinds of assignments in this class, and you will usually have two graded assignment per week. The assignments are designed to help you build and practice a variety of social science skills as you work toward a project at the end. With the exception of the Successful Year assignments, we expect that you will be spending about 60 to 90 minutes doing an assignment ahead of each class meeting. If your homework is taking significantly longer, please check in with us.

You can see how much each assignment is worth on Canvas (there are 1100 points overall), but here’s a brief overview of the major categories.

Reading Responses - 20%

“Successful Year” Assignment - 18%

Find the Social Science Exercises - 14%

Proposal Project - 26%

Community Building/ Team Participation - 22%

Final grades are assigned according to the following schedule:

A = 100-93%	C+ = 79-77%	D- = 62-60%
A- = 92-90%	C = 76-73%	F = Below 60%
B+ = 89-87%	C- = 72-70%
B = 86-83%	D+ = 69-67%
B- = 82-80%	D = 66-63%

Reading Responses (20%) - 11 Responses

In weeks that there is assigned reading, students will write and discuss brief reading responses in response to a prompt on Canvas.

“Successful Year” Assignment (15%) - 4 Reflection plus one in-class exercise

During the semester, students must complete 4 activities and write reflections, pursuing at least 3 of the 4 sophomore goals. We'll start this off with a graded in-class assignment as well.

Find the Social Science Exercises (14%) - 5 FSS exercises

Early in the semester, students will complete a series of assignments focused on reading and analyzing social science in both popular and academic contexts.

Proposal Project (26%) - 8 Weekly PP steps plus 3 examples of student work discussions

In the second half of the semester, students will work in interdisciplinary teams to develop a topic, create a research proposal, and present it at the end of the semester. Each step in the creation of the proposal is graded individually, plus the final poster will receive a group grade.

Community Building/ Team Participation (22%)

Social scientists rarely work alone. Instead, we work as teams to share ideas, develop new questions, and solve research problems. So most of our assignments in this class focus on building our classroom community, and developing your research team’s proposal and your team’s relationship. Most of them will be done in class.

In addition, participating in research is a key way we can participate in the community that social scientists study. So, the pre-test and post-test surveys are included in this category since they are used to assess the impact of the course as part of an ongoing study.

Course Materials

I will post to the course website (available on Canvas) any videos, online readings. PowerPoint presentations, and audio recordings of the lectures.

Required Book

There is NO required book for this course.

Course Schedule

Please check Canvas regularly for the course schedule. Keep up with the daily lectures and assignments.