Previous scholarship has demonstrated the value of high-impact practices of community engagement, inquiry-based pedagogy, and collaborative learning for engagement and learning in sociology courses, especially undergraduate research methods and statistics. This article explores the changes made to an upper-division undergraduate course focused on applied research practices and community-level interventions. After teaching the course once as a lecture-based course with assignments that simulated real projects and receiving poor student evaluation scores, I revised the course by partnering with local nonprofit organizations that were in need of research assistance. I turned the major graded assignments into real-world research projects that would ultimately be presented to the local organization, thus making everything actually count—in the real world. The findings from surveys of students, course evaluations, and assessment of group projects suggest that students found this to improve their experience of the course and to increase their learning and engagement of the material and confidence in their ability to conduct applied research on their own.

中文翻译：

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让它发挥作用：使用真实世界的项目进行课程作业

以前的奖学金已经证明了社区参与、基于探究的教学法和协作学习的高影响力实践对参与和学习社会学课程的价值，尤其是本科研究方法和统计学。本文探讨了对专注于应用研究实践和社区层面干预的高年级本科课程所做的更改。在将这门课程作为讲座式课程进行了一次教学后，作业模拟了真实项目并且学生的评估分数很差，我通过与需要研究援助的当地非营利组织合作对课程进行了修订。我将主要的分级作业变成了现实世界的研究项目，最终将提交给当地组织，因此，在现实世界中，一切都变得真正重要。学生调查、课程评估和小组项目评估的结果表明，学生发现这可以改善他们的课程体验，增加他们对材料的学习和参与，以及他们对自己进行应用研究的能力的信心。