Abstract:

The modern world of a young man is extremely different from realities of the past years. Availability of information, freedom of choice of activities, the openness of modern social systems, contradictory of social trends may cause the transformation of students' ideas about life values, unlikeness of these ideas from ideas of their peers for another ten or fifteen years ago. Therefore, the reform of the educational process in higher education must necessarily take the modern students' ideas about the system of social and life values into account, where necessary, trying flexibly to correct them, in other cases, trying to adjust to them. A system of social values of contemporary student youth is investigated in this paper on the basis of methods of analysis of variance, multidimensional scaling, factor analysis and methods of cluster analysis. To identify existing laws, we have carried out a case study. For the survey a sample was taken, which includes twenty-six fifth-grade students of the department named "Economics and Entrepreneurship" of South Ural State University (Chelyabinsk, Russia). List of fifteen variables consisted of the following values: Family, Friendship, Health, Work & Career, Money, Love, Education, Religion, Ecology, Security, Stability, Leisure, Prestige, Sports, Power. Students were asked to rank the proposed values according to the 15-point scale, ranging from the least important from their point of view, i.e., the higher the score, the corresponding value is more important for the student. Processing initial data was conducted with help of a computer program SPSS. In one year, the investigation was repeated for other students who studied at the Department of Information System of Chelyabinsk State University. Doing our investigations in different moments of time allows us to clarify trends of changing of the values of modern youth. It was shown that importance of education is not seen by young people as a prior factor in their lives. Besides, students do not see any connection between health and environmental component. They do not see any role of religion in strengthening the institutions of family and friendly relations. Those students who prefer such categories as Power and Prestige, do not see any connection among these categories and the variables Education, Health, and Sports. The obtained results can be used to raise effectiveness of teaching methods and update the system of education.

Keywords:

Pedagogical aspects, life values, multidimensional scaling, clusters, factor analysis.