Week 13 Sociology in Action Workshop: Six Districts, One Town Survey, and the Rituals Around You

Part 1 — The Big Picture

This week you learned that schools do jobs nobody planned, that tracking and cultural capital can pass advantage from one generation to the next, and that a survey of religious identity measures the label people report, not what they believe. In this workshop you work with 6 made-up school districts: you compute each district's honors-track percentage, look at how it lines up with the percent of families where a parent holds a degree, and read the pattern through the functionalist and conflict perspectives. Then you work a made-up town survey in percentage points and in percent, record one routine or ritual you have watched yourself, and ask a chatbot the same questions so you can catch where it goes wrong.

Time budget: Plan for about 90 minutes.

Part 2 — The Task

Guiding question: Across 6 districts, how does honors-track placement line up with parents' schooling, what can and can't those numbers tell you about any one student, and what do the routines and rituals around you teach or treat as sacred?

Workshop data: six illustrative school districts, an illustrative town survey, and your own observation of a routine or ritual (illustrative)

Source: An illustrative dataset constructed for this workshop, not from any real place: 6 made-up school districts, each with its entering students, its honors-track placements, and the percent of families with a parent holding a bachelor's degree, plus a made-up town survey in two rounds and an observation frame you complete from your own setting.

• District rows: 6 districts, labelled A to F, one per row of the scaffold's first table
• District columns: district; entering students; students placed in the honors track; percent of families with a parent holding a bachelor's degree
• Town survey rows: 2 survey rounds, each with its respondents and the number reporting no religion
• Observation rows: 4 rows you fill in from a school routine or a public ritual you have seen

Part 3 — Materials & Procedure

Tools and materials

• Free public data tables (Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Pew Research Center, World Bank, Our World in Data, General Social Survey) plus a spreadsheet (Google Sheets or any free spreadsheet)
• A document or notebook for your written answers

Ways of working

• apply-a-perspective-to-a-case
• read-and-interpret-social-data
• structured-observation-and-reflection

Procedure

1. Open a blank sheet. In row 1 type the headers District, Entering, Honors, Parent degree percent, and Honors percent in columns A to E. In rows 2 to 7 copy the six rows of the first table in Part 4. Tool: Free public data tables (Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Pew Research Center, World Bank, Our World in Data, General Social Survey) plus a spreadsheet (Google Sheets or any free spreadsheet). Check: Rows 2 to 7 hold District A to District F, and every honors count is smaller than its entering count.
2. In E2 type =C2/B2*100 and copy it down to E7 to get each district's honors percentage. In E8 type =MEDIAN(E2:E7) and in E9 type =MAX(E2:E7)-MIN(E2:E7). Copy every result into the second table in Part 4 and label the gap in percentage points. Tool: Free public data tables (Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Pew Research Center, World Bank, Our World in Data, General Social Survey) plus a spreadsheet (Google Sheets or any free spreadsheet). Check: The six honors percentages run from 10 to 35, and the gap is labelled in percentage points, not percent.
3. Sort the sheet by column D from lowest to highest. Write down whether the honors percentage in column E rises steadily, mostly rises, or shows no pattern as the parent-degree percent rises, and name any district that breaks the pattern. Check: The honors percentage mostly rises with the parent-degree percent, with at least one district out of line.
4. For the town survey in the third table, type 80 in J2 and 400 in K2, then 150 in J3 and 500 in K3. In L2 type =J2/K2*100 and copy it to L3. In L4 type =L3-L2 for the change in percentage points, and in L5 type =(L3-L2)/L2*100 for the percent change. Record all four results. Tool: Free public data tables (Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Pew Research Center, World Bank, Our World in Data, General Social Survey) plus a spreadsheet (Google Sheets or any free spreadsheet). Check: The two rounds give 20 and 30, the change is labelled in percentage points, and the percent change is labelled in percent.
5. Think of one school routine and one public ritual you have watched yourself, such as a bell schedule, a lineup, a moment of silence at a game, or a ceremony. Fill in the observation frame in Part 4 for each: what you observed, the concept it shows, and why it matters. Describe the setting and what happened, never anyone's personal faith. Check: Every row names a real routine or ritual you saw and ties it to a concept such as the hidden curriculum, civil religion, or the sacred.
6. Answer the analysis questions in Part 5, then do the AI-critique step in Part 6, or the equivalent route printed there, and write the 3–5 sentence report. Check: Every answer points to a value in your tables, a row of your observation frame, or a definition from this week, and your report quotes at least two errors with corrections.

Fallback route

When to use it: Use this route if no spreadsheet is available.

Work the same steps by hand or with a calculator. Divide each honors count by its entering students and multiply by 100, line up the six percentages to find the middle two and average them, subtract the lowest from the highest, and work each survey round, the change, and the percent change the same way. Write every division, multiplication, and subtraction in your document so it can be checked, complete every scaffold table, answer every analysis question, do the critique step, and submit the same items for equal credit.

This route earns the same credit as the primary route.

Part 4 — The Scaffold

These are the workshop's illustrative district figures; copy them into your sheet so every result comes from your own formulas.

Student scaffold table 1

District	Entering students	Students placed in honors	Families with a parent holding a bachelor's degree (percent)	Your note on this district
District A	200	20	15
District B	300	45	20
District C	250	50	30
District D	400	100	35
District E	150	36	45
District F	500	175	55

Record what you computed here so your interpretation rests on numbers you produced yourself.

Student scaffold table 2

Measure	Your result	How you got it
District A honors percentage
District B honors percentage
District C honors percentage
District D honors percentage
District E honors percentage
District F honors percentage
Median honors percentage of the six districts
Gap between highest and lowest honors percentage (percentage points)

This illustrative town ran the same survey question twice; work each round as a percentage before you compare them.

Student scaffold table 3

Survey round	Respondents	Reporting no religion	Percent reporting no religion
First round	400	80
Second round	500	150
Change in percentage points
Percent change

Use this observation frame to move from what you saw, to the concept it shows, to why it matters.

Student scaffold table 4

What I observed	Which concept it shows	So what
A school routine I watched
A second school routine or rule
A public ritual I watched
Something set apart and treated with care

Part 5 — Analysis Questions

1. Report each district's honors percentage, the median of the six, and the gap between the highest and lowest in percentage points, plus the town's two round percentages, the change in percentage points, and the percent change, showing the formula or the arithmetic behind each.
2. Read the district table four ways: what is measured, over whom, what it shows and does not, and whether the link between parents' degrees and honors placement is a correlation, a cause, or neither. Name at least two explanations for the link, and say in one sentence why a district percentage cannot tell you about one student.
3. Read the district pattern through structural functionalism and conflict theory, one or two sentences each: what a functionalist would say tracking does, and what the conflict accounts, cultural capital and the correspondence principle, would say about who lands in honors. Name the level of analysis and declare no winner.
4. From your observation frame, connect one routine to the hidden curriculum or a manifest or latent function, and one ritual to civil religion or to Durkheim's sacred and profane. Describe settings and what happened, not anyone's personal faith.
5. Name two limits, such as that the districts and the town are illustrative, that a district percentage says nothing about one student, that reporting no religion is not the same as not believing, or that two survey rounds cannot show why a figure changed, and say how each limit affects what you can conclude.
6. Choose one and answer it in 3–4 sentences: (a) a friend says the town has become a town of atheists because the figure rose 50 percent; what would you tell them, and what evidence would change your answer? (b) pick one routine or ritual from your observation frame and, without naming anyone, say which perspective's reading of it fits best and at what level that explanation works.

Part 6 — AI-Critique Moment

Choose one equal-credit critique route. Route A: ask an approved AI tool to critique your completed work, then check its response against your own evidence. Route B is the no-AI equivalent printed below.

Approved tools: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Microsoft Copilot.

Prompt to paste:

I've pasted my completed workshop tables above. An illustrative set of 6 school districts, labelled A to F, lists each district's entering students, the number placed in an honors track, and the percent of families in which a parent holds a bachelor's degree. District A: 200, 20, 15%. District B: 300, 45, 20%. District C: 250, 50, 30%. District D: 400, 100, 35%. District E: 150, 36, 45%. District F: 500, 175, 55%. An illustrative town survey found that 80 of 400 respondents reported no religion in its first round and 150 of 500 in its second round. Please do five things. First, find each district's honors percentage, the median of the six, and the gap between the highest and lowest, and the town's change in percentage points and in percent. Second, tell me which sociologist came up with cultural capital and who proposed the correspondence principle, and who called religion the opium of the people. Third, explain whether more parents with degrees causes more students to be placed in honors. Fourth, describe what families in District A are like and what they think about school. Fifth, tell me the chance that one particular student in District F is in the honors track, and whether a respondent in the second round who reported no religion is an atheist.

Test the response for these likely failures:

• Chatbots often add an outside figure or a named study, such as a confident national honors-placement rate or a study that supposedly proved parent degrees raise placement by a set amount.
• Chatbots often credit cultural capital to Bowles and Gintis, the correspondence principle to Bourdieu, or the opium line to Weber or Durkheim.
• Chatbots often describe the families of the lowest-placing district from a stereotype, for example as not valuing education.
• Chatbots often say the table shows that more parents with degrees causes more students to be placed in honors.
• Chatbots often turn District F's honors percentage into one student's chance, or call a respondent who reported no religion an atheist.

In 3–5 sentences, say what the chatbot got right, quote at least two sentences it got wrong, and correct each one with evidence from your tables or this week's definitions.

Equivalent route (no AI required)

No AI account is required for this workshop. This route assesses the same objectives, Objective 7 (explain the major social institutions — family, education, religion, the economy and work, and government and politics — through the functionalist, conflict, and interactionist perspectives, including Weber's types of authority and the pluralist and power-elite models) and Objective 2 (describe and evaluate the major sociological research methods (surveys, experiments, field research and ethnography, secondary-data analysis), distinguish reliability from validity and a population from a sample, and read a social statistic critically — what it measures, over what population and period, what it shows and does not, and whether it is a correlation or a cause), takes comparable effort of about the same 90 minutes, uses the same rubric, and earns the same credit. Instead of the chatbot, critique this flawed analysis, printed here in full: "The table proves that parents with degrees cause their children to be placed in honors. A national study found that every extra 10 percent of parents with degrees adds 5 honors students per hundred. Bowles and Gintis invented cultural capital, and Weber called religion the opium of the people. The families in District A do not care about school. A student in District F has a 35 percent chance of being in honors. And since the town's figure rose 50 percent, half the town is now atheist." Mark every error you can find, quote at least two, and correct each one in 3–5 sentences with evidence from your tables or this week's definitions. Submit the marked-up analysis and your correction in place of the chatbot report and share link.

Part 7 — What to Submit

• All four completed scaffold tables, including your observation frame
• Written answers to all six analysis questions
• The chatbot critique report with its share link, or the equivalent route's marked-up flawed analysis

Deliverable:

A short Sociology in Action Workshop report on 6 illustrative school districts, an illustrative town survey, and your own observations: four completed tables (the district figures with your notes, your computed honors percentages, the town survey, and your observation frame), written answers to six analysis questions, and a critique of a chatbot's answers to the same questions, or, on the equivalent route, a marked-up correction of the printed flawed analysis. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text. Choose how you show it: written answers, a recorded explanation with a transcript, or a labelled diagram of your computed figures and your observations with short notes; every form is graded by the same scoring criteria.

Rubric

The rubric below shows how each submitted part is evaluated; bands are full, partial, or none.

Workshop evaluation criteria

Criterion	Full	Partial	None
Computing honors percentages and survey changes	Every honors percentage, the median, the gap, both round percentages, the change, and the percent change are computed from the workshop's figures with the formulas or arithmetic shown, and the gap and the change are labelled in percentage points.	Most values are computed, but one percentage, the median, or a change is missing or wrong, a step is not shown, or a difference between percentages is labelled in percent.	No values are reported, or the values are invented rather than computed.
Reading the table: association, units, and one student	The answer reads the district table four ways, calls the link an association with at least two possible explanations, keeps percentage points apart from percent, and refuses to apply a district figure to one student.	The answer reads the table but treats the link as a cause, mixes up the two units, or applies a district figure to a student.	No answer is given, or the table is read as proof that parents' degrees cause honors placement.
Two perspectives and the observation frame	The pattern is read through the functionalist account and the conflict accounts with each stated fairly, the level named, and no verdict, and the observation frame ties real routines and rituals to concepts such as the hidden curriculum or civil religion, describing settings rather than anyone's faith.	One account or the level is missing, one account is stated unfairly, or the observations are listed without a concept.	No perspective analysis or observation is given, or the frame judges a person's faith rather than describing a setting.
Critique and correction	The chatbot critique report or the marked-up flawed analysis quotes at least two errors and corrects each with evidence from the tables or this week's definitions; both routes earn this band equally.	The chatbot critique report or the marked-up flawed analysis names an error but corrects it without evidence, or corrects only one; both routes earn this band equally.	No chatbot critique report or marked-up flawed analysis is submitted, or the output is pasted without any check; both routes are scored the same way.
Limits and reflection	Two real limits are named with their effect on the conclusion, and the chosen reflection option is answered with a reason.	One limit is named, or a limit is named without its effect, or the reflection gives no reason.	No limit or reflection is given.

Quality Gate

• Every honors percentage, median, gap, round percentage, and change in your tables comes from your own formulas or your own hand calculation from the workshop's figures, never from memory or a chatbot.
• Every difference between two percentages is written in percentage points, and every percent change is labelled in percent.
• Your table answer calls the link between parents' degrees and honors placement an association, not a cause.
• Your answers never apply a district percentage to one student or read reporting no religion as not believing.
• Your perspective answer states each account at full strength and declares no winner.
• Your observation frame describes settings and events, not anyone's personal faith.
• No statistic, study, or source is invented anywhere in the submission.
• The critique quotes the chatbot or the flawed analysis and corrects at least two errors with evidence.