Diagnostics of Structural Thinking of Bachelors of Pedagogical Education as a Universal Pedagogical Competence

Abstract

Structural thinking is an important skill that allows you to identify structures in randomly presented information, see relationships at all levels, makes it possible to break a whole into components and create holistic structures and systems from a set of elements. Structural thinking plays a special role in the activities of a teacher, because the pedagogical process constantly requires the organization of educational information for the purpose of its effective perception. The lecturer constantly has to process a huge amount of educational material, highlighting the main thing and setting a certain visual structure. However, despite the many works devoted to the development of structural thinking, the question of its diagnosis as a professional competence remains open.The aim of the paper is to develop diagnostic material for assessing the level of development of structural thinking as a universal pedagogical competence and its testing among undergraduate students at the Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of the Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University named after V.P. Astafiev.Materials and methods. Analysis of psychological and pedagogical literature and methodological developments made it possible to construct diagnostic material for assessing structural thinking as a universal pedagogical competence at three levels: the level of structure, the level of details and the level of complex tasks. The study was conducted among 84 students of the 2nd-3rd year of the Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University named after V.P. Astafiev studying in the direction of “Pedagogical Education” with the profiles “Mathematics and Computer Science”, “Physics and Technology”. Respondents were offered a text for which they had to complete four professional tasks - the ability to highlight the main idea, the ability to create a tree of concepts, put educational questions to the text and the ability to compress information. Each task reflected the level at which students developed structural thinking.The results of the study showed that many students have difficulties identifying the main idea in the text, and as a consequence, constructing its structure in the form of a mental diagram. Students experienced particular difficulties when putting questions to the text, allowing them to cover its entire amount of information and compress the text into an information poster. The data obtained confirm the need to familiarize students with methods and tools for constructing diagrams, concept models, learning to put questions to educational material, and visualizing information through compression, which is also noted by the authors of the analyzed works in this study.Conclusion. The data obtained actualize the need to focus educational tasks on working with structures in the process of professional training of future lecturers. In addition, the proposed methodology can be used to identify at what level students begin to experience difficulties in structuring and visualizing information, and to select suitable methods and means for developing their structural thinking.

Keywords

• structural thinking
• universal pedagogical competence
• professional training of future lecturers
• data structures
• information visualization