ACCORDING TO THE American Sociological

Association (ASA), one of the primary ob-jectives of sociology classes is to enhance students ’ sociological imagination. Students should learn a systematic, logical under-standing of the social world and the influ-ence of social forces on themselves and others and they should be liberated from ideology (McKinney et al. 2004). Many undergraduate students enter college with-out prior coursework in sociology and, therefore, have an underdeveloped socio-logical imagination. However, it would be wrong to assume our students enter college with no preconceived understanding of the social world. In this paper, I argue that stu-dents enter our classes with strongly held explanations for social phenomena (ideologies) that they and many others take for granted. Further, I argue that unless instructors employ strategies to deliberately discredit these misconceptions, students likely will continue to hold them after they leave college. Studies of student learning across the cur-riculum support this pessimistic view of college education. These studies find that students leave college with many of the same misconceptions (and ideologies) they held upon entering college (Gardner 1991). Even students who do well in school often retain material for only short periods or can apply it only in relation to the specific sub-ject matter covered in class. When asked to apply the new material to different areas and novel situations, students typically re-vert back to their previously held, deeply ingrained misconceptions (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 1999). The implication for instructors who wish to engage students’ sociological imaginations is that students will not likely use their sociological imagi-nations in their daily lives or in the future; instead, they will continue to understand the world in much the same way as they did before taking our classes. To address this problem, learning theo-rists recommend that teachers help student