Presented as part of the DC Research Café (October 29, 2020). In this presentation I discuss a longitudinal research study in which I investigated student learning in my introductory sociology classes. This involved tracking students’ developing understanding of a crucial ‘threshold concept’ - the sociological imagination - over the duration of each course and then following this up with an online survey, approximately one year after it ended, to examine how strong a grasp students retained of this concept and how it had influenced their thinking. While I report briefly on some of the research findings, my primary focus here is on demonstrating the importance of going beyond ‘snapshot’ testing of students’ grasp of course content if we want to know what they have really learned and understood. Author keywords: Research on student learning; Sociology and the sociological imagination; Threshold concepts; Using classroom assessment techniques
