Formation of research competence of students in higher school: potential of the term and graduate research educational support program

The issue of organizing students’ research work is particularly acute when the quality of research carried out for term and graduate papers is assessed. Often that issue is considered to be connected with the deficit of students’ educational background for university studies, the drawbacks of e-learning, etc. In our opinion, such issue formulation makes us channel the discussion into the field of insurmountable problems and locks the sphere of projecting and researching on university educational programs. In the article, we have studied the experience of finding the solution to the problem of education quality increase and supervising students’ term and graduate research through working out and implementing a program of educational support. The program of educational support for term and graduate research work for the major Human Resources Management was worked out at the Chair of Education Management (Faculty of Psychology, Tomsk State University). The basis for program design and the presented research is the methodology of humanistic management and research worked out by G.N. Prozumentova as well as the works by K. Gergen, A.A. Polonnikov, M.A. Gusakovsky, M.A. Korbut which explore the concept of education as discourse and communication practices for social reality construction. The idea of meta-competences as the super-subject component of educational results (I. Zimnaya et all.) is regarded as substantial for understanding the research content. In the article, we analyze the experience of implementing an educational support program. We determine the effectiveness of educational, organizational and management tools of the program for education quality increase. The problems of the program implementation among undergraduate students majoring in HR Management are defined. The analysis of self-study tasks offered for students and interpretation of students’ results obtained while completing the tasks can be of some interest. The main result of the research is distinguishing empirical characteristics of education quality while implementing the program of educational support. The empirical characteristics are the following: emerging ‘sub-subject’, personal experience and knowledge about the role research plays in management, students’ engagement in studying their own experience, creating the situations of comprehension and discovering the content of management. The crucial result of the program is acquiring the skills in describing and interpreting a managerial situation as well as expanding the comprehension of theoretical knowledge, transition of informational knowledge about a certain function of HR Management into personal comprehension and constructing a field of research interest and further to practical implementation of this function in management. The research has shown the effectiveness of organizational and management solution to the issue of including the program of educational support into the curriculum of the educational program for undergraduate students majoring in HR Management. Further, the educational content of the optional courses (the professional training-based part of the educational program) was panned on the basis of that solution. The research also resulted in distinguishing the problems of working out and implementing the program of educational support. The program is aimed at providing formation of professors’ competences in organizing meaning-based communication and supporting student’s research interest. Thus, the experience of implementing the program of educational support enables to trace the situation of losing the tie connecting a student who carries out the research within the frameworks of the program with the research itself supervised by a chair professor.

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