Thinking Through Methods

Thinking Through Methods

Sociological research is hard enough already—you don't need to make it even harder by smashing about like a bull in a china shop, not knowing what you're doing or where you're heading. Or so says John Levi Martin in this witty, insightful, and desperately needed primer on how to practice rigorous social science. Thinking Through Methods focuses on the practical decisions that you will need to make as a researcher— where the data you are working with comes from and how that data relates to all the possible data you could have gathered. This is a user's guide to sociological research, designed to be used at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Rather than offer mechanical rules and applications, Martin chooses instead to team up with the reader to think through and with methods. He acknowledges that we are human beings—and thus prone to the same cognitive limitations and distortions found in subjects—and proposes ways to compensate for these limitations. Martin also forcefully argues for principled symmetry, contending that bad ethics makes for bad research, and vice versa. Thinking Through Methods is a landmark work—one that students will turn to again and again throughout the course of their sociological research.

Thinking Through the Language Arts

Thinking Through Mathematics

This document focuses on how mathematics teaching and learning can be improved by developing more powerful approaches to connect thinking and mathematics. It proposes changing perspectives on what it means to learn and do mathematics and explores how these perspectives can be incorporated into the teaching of secondary school mathematics. Chapter 1 offers a view of mathematics as emerging largely from individual and social activity rather than from textbooks, worksheets, and tradition. The learner is depicted as someone who actively constructs meaning instead of passively receiving it. Chapter 2 considers how a greater emphasis on communication (discussion, debate, recording, and writing) stimulates and uncovers students' learning and thinking and leads to a deeper understanding by both teachers and students. Chapter 3 explores how teachers might encourage greater inquiry and communication in a secondary school class by making minor, but thought-provoking changes in ordinary problems and situations. Finally, chapter 4 gives some practical advice on transforming the mathematics classroom into a place where students are expected not only to absorb and consume mathematics but also to produce and think about it. Contains 17 references and 17 figures. (MKR)