THE PROJECT APPROACH TO SOCIOLOGIST-STUDENTS TRAINING IN RESEARCH DISCIPLINES

Shamil Farhutdinov

The development of the new ways of sociologist-students training is an urgent task today. The author’s experience shows that the use of the project method can significantly improve the efficiency of the training process. In the process of teaching activities, the author has tried to form its own approach to teaching subject “Methodology and methods of sociological research”, based on the project method. As a result, there has been developed a technique called “Stone soup” (in honor of the Russian folk tale, the meaning of the plot is similar to the algorithm of the proposed technique). The technology involves five consecutive steps and starts with the distribution of the model research papers, prepared by the teacher (let’s call this work “stone”). During the first stage, students need to study these papers, and then choose the topic which they want to research. The second stage supposes that the students process the theoretical part, based on the existing structure. They transform and fill it with the theoretical material, related to topic of their research. For this purpose, various sociological online resources are introduced by the teacher to the students. The third stage is intended to enrich the theoretical part with the results of the studies on the subject conducted by other sociologists. For this purpose the students download the results of the surveys from the Internet archive database and conduct their secondary analysis. The fourth stage implies the carrying out of student’s own sociological survey and the replace the empirical part of the scientific work with the results of their survey. Here the student writes introduction and conclusion to research paper. The fifth stage is preparation of publication on the results of the work done.