The fact students come to Sociology with a certain level of prior knowledge about the areas they’re studying – from families through education to crime – is something teachers can exploit to demonstrate how sociological knowledge and research can be used to question many of the taken-for-granted assumptions we make about the social world.
And while the content will obviously be different, the technique is the same whatever topic you’re teaching: present your students with a list of questions about the topic they’re about to study, reveal the answers and use the ensuing confusion and disbelief to introduce relevant sociological evidence and explanations.
And if by some weird twist of fate your students all provide perfectly correct answers (unlikely but stranger things have happened at sea. Apparently) you can just skip the “evidence” part and move straight to the sociological explanations.
While the prior knowledge technique usually means you will have to do a bit of preparation by creating suitable pre-questions for the topic at hand, on occasions these can just drop into your lap: this set of “How much do you really know about crime?” questions created by the Office for National Statistics being a case in point. As the site puts it:
“Although we encounter crime, whether through headlines, conversations or experience, it is easy for our perception of crime to be distorted”.
And to prove that – or otherwise – they’ve devised a short online test consisting of nine questions of varying interest and utility you could happily give to your students without you having to make much of an effort at all,
There are, however, a couple of possible limitations:
1. The information is drawn from the 2021 Census and is a few years out-of-date. On the plus side, it’s not difficult to bring the information bang-up-to-date with a little digging around on the ONS site if you’re really keen. If you can’t be bothered the data’s probably current enough for most teaching purposes.
2. This data only applies to crime in England and Wales. This is rather a big drawback if you teach in other countries. And while it’s probably not much consolation, although the principle of the Prior-Learning Technique is the same wherever you teach.
It’s just that in this instance you’ll have to do all the preparation yourself.