No 1 (2019)

The paper considers the changes in the structure of the educational environment of a technical university caused by the development of partnership of a university, business, and the state. The concept of triple helix serves as a driver of the development of technical education and promotes the formation of administrative, communicative and business competencies of new-style engineers. The author gives a brief analysis of changes taking place today in a technical university that allows speaking about the creation of an appropriate environment for the training of professionally qualified new-generation engineers able both to generate ideas and bring them up to commercialization. The paper shows that in the conditions of integrative changes, the requirements to the technical university graduates became more complicated and, in the conditions of market competition, should conform to the challenges of new time, therefore, empowering teachers to search for the ways of involving future engineers in the real research, business, and innovative activity. The successfulness of behavior of innovative processes in technical education depends largely on teaching staff, their value-based attitude to the happening changes. Subsequently, the professional and educational activity of a teacher in the conditions of integrative changes should be carried out at a qualitatively different level and have interdisciplinary nature. All of these things cause the necessity in the support of a technical university teacher aimed at the improvement of his or her teaching competence, in the expansion of the range of teacher’s professional activities through the introduction of innovative strategies, technologies and ways of training engineers in accordance with the needs of a real economy sector.

The development of the information society led to the appearance of new concepts characterizing personal qualities necessary to live in it. One of these qualities is information worldview. The introduction of disciplines responsible for the information education into the future teacher training promotes the acquiring of knowledge and skills in the information sphere and the formation of information competence, however, it is insufficient to form the information worldview. It causes the necessity to study this process.   

One of the stages of studying the educational process is its modeling. The construction of a pedagogical model will allow, firstly, studying the process prior to its start, secondly, organizing, correcting and implementing it in more details. The goal of the paper is the creation of a pedagogical model of the process of continuous formation of information worldview of a future teacher.

To construct a model, the author specifies the disciplines of the curriculum containing the potential for formation of the information worldview components: the teaching forms, methods and media are determined; the initial, formative and summative assessments of the level of formedness of information worldview of a future teacher are developed.    

The result of the study is the structural-functional model consisting of four blocks: target (the goal of the pedagogical process is the formation of information worldview of a future teacher), content-related, organizational-methodological (teaching forms, methods, and media), reflexive-evaluative (types and sequence of assessment). The content-related block includes the stages of formation of information worldview, forming components of the quality under the study, methodological approaches and didactic principles of education. Within this block, the interrelation of the stages of formation of information worldview and forming components (axiological, cognitive, and activity-practical) are shown.

The constructed pedagogical model of the process of formation of information worldview of a future teacher reflects its essential characteristics and gives the whole picture of the process.

The paper deals with the topical issue of formation of the system of concepts of the man-caused emergency situations during the classes when learning the course “Life Safety”. Within the current school education in the area of life safety, the concepts are more often presented to the students ready prepared that is reflected in the low level of subject knowledge of schoolchildren as the verbatim learning of the concepts does not promote the development of active thinking processes. At the same time, in the practice of subject training, the methodological recommendations on the application of active (interactive) methods and means of teaching when teaching the course “Life Safety” allowing updating and intensifying the educational process and thus involving schoolchildren in the active cognitive activity are underrepresented. The main goal of the paper is to develop the technique of organizing and conducting a Life Safety lesson in the 8th grade using visual modeling means, the application of which is aimed at the formation of the high level of subject knowledge of schoolchildren due to the use of various graphical objects (signs, pictures, symbols, legend keys, etc.), color palettes, associations, threads, etc. Mental maps displaying the structure of the system of concepts, the interrelation of concepts and their genesis form the basis of visual modeling means in the proposed experimental technique. The paper presents the example of the developed experimental technique of a lesson with the application of visual modeling means (mental maps) when teaching the course “Life Safety” (the 8th grade). The author considers the Life Safety lesson plan-notes where he describes in detail the course of the Life Safety lesson as well as demonstrates the examples of formed mental maps visually displaying the system of concepts of man-caused emergency situations, in particular, the accidents with the release of accidentally chemically hazardous substances.

The paper studies the emotional burnout of heads of educational institutions and its interrelation with personal characteristics and value-based orientations. The relevance of the subject under the study is caused by the emerging contradiction between the manager’s active self-fulfillment and the deficiency of personal resources. It leads to the development of stable negative emotional states of the heads of educational institutions manifested in defatigation and overtiredness. Forty directors of educational institutions of Togliatti were selected for the research. In the study, the authors reveal the personal characteristics of directors of educational institutions, their value-based orientations and carry out the analysis of influence on their emotional burnout. The study determined that a third of respondents participated in the research had a high level of psychoemotional strain and stress that triggered the development of certain emotional burnout symptoms. The main personal characteristics interrelated with the emotional burnout of the study group of directors of educational institutions are emotional instability, excessive restraint, suspiciousness, anxiety, low behavior normativity, and tension. The study identified the statistically significant interrelations between the emotional burnout syndrome of heads of educational institutions and terminal and instrumental values such as wisdom of life, interesting job, prosperous life, the respect of others and friends, self-improvement, self-perfection, freedom, independence, good family relations, self-confidence, uncompromising attitude to deficiencies, courage in standing one’s ground, tolerance and efficiency in activities.

The paper presents the results and the analysis of the empirical study aimed at identifying the relations of self-attitude and personal-typological, social-psychological, and professional-career characteristics of government officials. Two hundred four government officials living in Ulan-Ude, the Buryat Republic, at the ages from 21 to 57 participated in this study. When carrying out the statistical analysis of data, the authors determined the dependence of the results of the study on the following indices: job position, gender, age, special basic education, and approval motivation. The study of the interrelation of self-attitude and psychological characteristics of government officials revealed the difference in the indices of self-attitude of the respondents of different employment periods, ages and genders. The results of the analysis indicated that the age and gender mediated the interrelations between self-attitude and job positions of government officials. The analysis of interrelation between self-attitude of government officials and their job position showed that specialists involved in the sphere of government service had more developed axiological relations than the managers of the same sphere had. The analysis of interrelation of self-attitude of government officials with their special basic education showed that the government officials with basic pedagogical education had the most troubled, disharmonic self-attitude in this sample group, and the government officials with basic legal education demonstrated the most positive self-attitude. The analysis of interrelation of self-attitude with the approval motivation of government officials showed that with the increase of the need in social approval it was possible to percept the individual self as the internal ramrod providing personal integrity or to manifest the tendency to closedness and the lack of desire to change.

The paper covers the study of the problem of risky behavior in adolescence. The risk is an essential attribute of human life. Sometimes, each of us has to make decisions, the consequences of which it is difficult to estimate. The adolescence is characterized by the reassessment of attitudes towards life, the emergence of the desire to carry out control over all its manifestations. Risky behavior can be one of the ways to implement such control when through own experience the surrounding reality is cognized. Risky behavior demonstrates both the negative and positive tendencies. Meanwhile, it is the adolescence when risky behavior causes an unpredictable threat to human health and life and is not sufficiently adapted and is poorly predicted. All the abovementioned indicates the reasonability of studying risky behavior of adolescents, identifying personal determinants of risk appetite. The author organized and carried out the empirical study of the interrelation between the personal characteristics of adolescents and the propensity to risky behavior. As a diagnostic tool, the author used A.G. Shmelev’s questionnaire to determine the propensity to take risks, M. Tsukkerman’s technique “Self-assessment of the propensity to the extremely risky behavior”, H. Eysenck’s “Self-assessment of mental states” to determine personality factors, and R.V. Ovcharova’s questionnaire. 60 adolescents at the age of 15-16 years participated in the study. Data analysis showed the high proneness of adolescents to risky behavior with the dominance of the desire of seeking sensations. The author defined the following personal factors of risky behavior of adolescents: anxiety, aggressiveness, rigidity, frustration, and inadequate self-esteem. The statistical analysis confirmed the correlation relationship between risk appetite and low levels of anxiety, rigidity, frustration, as well as high aggressiveness and self-esteem.