Sociology is Different: The Misevaluation of Teaching Effectiveness

This paper inquires into the special problems of teaching undergraduate sociology in the last decades of the twentieth century. A major tenet of the argument is that sociology instructors, while facing with their colleagues in other departments a common set of pedagogical concerns, must also confront a distinct, perhaps unique, set of problems that results from the very nature of sociology and, to a lesser extent, from its uncertain status within the university curriculum. Sociology has been from its inception, an “oppositional science.” The critical nature of sociology renders the evaluation of teaching effectiveness particularly difficult. For this reason, I argue that the use of students’ratings as the single, or central, measure of teaching effectiveness may actually decrease the quality of classroom instructors rather than to produce the presumed intended result of increasing it.