Students' readiness for research activities

Well-developed research skills are an important indicator of a specialist's training quality in any field. It is particularly important for teachers who deal with problem solving on a daily basis, and whose professional success relies on that. This research aims to investigate the degree to which students (future teachers) are prepared for research activities. The starting provision for developing the methodology of the work is the understanding of research activities as a set of actions reflecting their subject content and carried out in the context of an academic solution of urgent professional pedagogical issues. The list of research activities is based on a multistage selection procedure using the method of expert assessment. Experts include university professors (under- and postgraduate students' advisers) and third- and fourth-year undergraduate students studying teacher training at the Institute of Psychology and Pedagogical Sciences of the University of Tyumen. The degree of students' preparedness for research activities is determined by their research skills level. Regardless of the significant overvaluation (compared to the professors' assessment), the third-year students do not rate their own research skills highly, they do not consider themselves sufficiently ready to conduct research. The greatest difficulty, in the students' perspective, is the hypothesis formulation. Besides that, they lack knowledge of terminology in pedagogical research, content and principles of planning and conducting pedagogical research, including methods of scientific and practical search. The fourth-year students assess their research skills slightly higher than the third-year students do. However, they assessed themselves to be at the intermediate level, with their weakest skill being hypothesis formulation as well. The professors share these opinions and find the students unprepared for research activities (the third-year students in particular). They rated the students' skills for hypothesis, topic, aim and tasks articulation, expressing their own opinion and assessment, as well as knowing urgent educational problems and the logical and creative bases of the study the lowest. Interestingly, the students do not express particular interest in research in general. In the conclusion, based on the professors' and students' assessment of the students' low research skills level, the author supposes that such students will have troubles with organizing and conducting a competent research work, as well as with teaching other people to do it. Higher education institutions aim to improve students' methodological training, to lead them towards the values and meanings relevant to their research activities and to focus them on combining the subject and research aspects in their professional activities.

Keywords

Authors

References