China 高一 Comprehensive Practical Activities (senior)

1. Components (8 credits)

Research-based learning: 6 credits, two research projects or designs, mostly interdisciplinary · Party and youth-league activities · Military training · Social investigation

• Research Skills: From a Question to a Finished Project – Research is a careful way of finding an answer. You ask a clear, focused question, plan how to answer it, find information and check that each source can be trusted, collect and analyse your own data, draw a conclusion that the evidence supports, and share it while crediting every source you used.
• Sociological Research Methods – Sociologists study society by doing research, step by step: choose a topic, write an aim or hypothesis, run a small pilot study, choose a sample, collect data, analyse it and draw conclusions. A sample is a small group picked from the whole population; it should be representative so the results can be generalised. Quantitative data are numbers (from questionnaires, structured interviews, official statistics); qualitative data are words and meanings (from unstructured interviews, observation, documents). Primary data are collected by the researcher; secondary data already exist. Good research is reliable (repeatable), valid (a true picture) and representative. Researchers choose methods based on practical issues (time, cost, access), ethical issues (consent, confidentiality, harm, deception) and theory: positivists prefer scientific, numerical methods, while interpretivists prefer methods that capture people's meanings.