SCIENCE & EDUCATION

The article considers a process to form an individual curriculum using the cognitive visualization and cognitive maps methods. It researches the possibility to visualize and track the learning paths in direct communication between a tutor and a student, and with a learner using an intelligent computer-aided training system (including virtual tutor). The first case concerns the method for joint constructing the personality resource cards by student and tutor. In the second case a method for constructing the diagnostic knowledge cognitive maps, which automatically synthesize an individual curriculum and contribute to its maintenance, is considered.

This article discusses the problem of training engineers for the aerospace industry. The paper discusses the issues raised at an international forum in China (Beijing, September 2012), which the author attended. Using an experience in activities of industry-integrated faculties of Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU) and 29 years of personal experience as a Dean of one of such faculties the author formulates the basic principles for the rational construction of highly efficient educational process in cooperation with leading industrial enterprises. There are five fully functional faculties of this type at the University, and the main condition for the successful implementation of the system under consideration is an active involvement of the enterprise.

For solving a task of socialization of higher technical education at higher methodological and functional levels, the harmonization of educational standards by introducing interdisciplinary courses into the training process was proposed; such courses are associated with providing creative forms of professional activity. Logical structure of such courses includes studying the culture of professional way of thinking or the basis of intellectual competence by examples from scientific-technical knowledge domains.  These features make it possible to use proposed courses not only for task-oriented trainings and forming the required set of professionally significant personal skills but for developing a wide spectrum of key transferable competences.

This article presents printed and electronic teaching aids used for training partially deaf students in a machining laboratory; these educational guides combine theoretical knowledge, materials that help to develop certain skills and various forms of tests and self-assessment. A common approach to development of such training aids and their methodical features were presented. A fragment of such a teaching guide meant for out-of-school self-guided work of partially deaf students was also presented in this paper for illustrative purposes. This teaching guide would help to master missed materials without an instructor.

The author presents results of an empirical study aimed at implementation of a competence-based analysis of professional elitism in the sphere of technology. A competence model developed in accordance with the author's concept of professional elitism in the sphere of technology was proposed for the first time in this work. On the basis of the conducted competence-based analysis the main requirements to the level and quality of professional activities of elite specialists in the sphere of technology were revealed; these characteristics describe the focus and ability of elite experts of a technical activity profile holistically. The most important result of this work was creation of three basic clusters of competencies that reflect specifics of vocational elitism in the sphere of technology, including psychological peculiarities of the subject of work, socio-organizational interaction and interpersonal communication.

The author defines the main problems of the existing education system and their solutions. The author outlined the contours of a promising "advanced" education system and the main directions of its formation. One of the directions is solving the problems of fundamentality of education. With an adequate form of modern science, fundamental education becomes acquires communicative, interdisciplinary nature which leads to the need for changes in the content of education and teaching activities. It is shown that for development of creative abilities of students an optimal structure of studying a discipline is a structure which is similar to the structure of scientific research. The author reveals a contradictory approach to modular design of educational programs. The author shows peculiarities of specialist training in the field of high-end technologies, the need for an evolutionary transition from the educational and training process to the scientific and educational process. The author gives examples of interaction of fundamental and applied aspects of the educational process, according to the proposed methodology.

In this article author analyses the role of Research Universities in creation of unified educational and scientific domain of Russia, also the implementation of modern educational paradigm “life long learning”. Author emphasizes that problem of continuous education in postgraduate life period of a specialist, working in scientific-industrial companies, is not developed enough. Author proposes some directions of solving this problem.

In this article the author analyzes a topical task of increasing the degree of objectification of results of automated methods for diagnosing the level of mastering teaching material. The author also describes key shortcomings of existent and widely applied diagnostic methods. The author hypothesizes the need for taking into consideration semantic and logical relationships between assignments for submission in diagnostic methods. He also proposed a  model of control and measuring material. Formulas for quantitative assessment of solution quality of assignments are defined and the corresponding algorithm of its calculation is given. On the basis of performance of the developed method and algorithm the author draws a conclusion on their solvency.

Goal-setting is the most important stage of education process design and implementation. The authors analyze modern Russian and foreign structures of educational goals as well as the hierarchical classification (taxonomy). The authors note insufficiency of the number of educative (affective) goals in educational programs for students of technical universities.

The authors analyzed and summarized their experience in forming leadership competencies in BMSTU hearing-impaired students with the help of special programs through social practices and project activity. The authors consider the key aspects and technology of implementation of the Leaderships School as a universal tool of forming leaderships features for those vocational and higher education institution health impaired students. The proposed system approach to forming leaders from disadvantage group of students at National Research University within BMSTU is an example of implementation of the innovative form and content of engineering education and its high humanization. The Leaderships programs become the needed element of engineering training from the position of social and management aspects.

This article covers modern problems of restructuring educational systems according to the Bologna declaration guidelines. The comparative analysis of a three-level professional education system “bachelor – master – doctor” is considered by the example of Germany and Russia. The main differences of educational process in German universities is taken into account. It is shown that the new teaching approach replaces the traditional teaching concept and focuses, first and foremost, on students, and is reorganized subject to training. According to the new teaching concept the final results of teaching is the first-defined matter when the educational program is being worked out. Authors conclude that during Russia’s adoption of the high-school system according to the Bologna process, restructuring should be held gradually and carefully to keep Russia’s teaching traditions. And students with their need for education should be the center of this process.

The authors consider the importance of courses related to formation of professional ethos. It was shown that in the modern world engineers often act as decision-makers not only in the spheres of engineering and technology but also in social and political spheres. The authors argue the danger of technocracy and demonstrate ways of overcoming it in the system of engineering education.

The necessity of development of students’ vocational thinking culture was described in this article. Besides, the author gives a definition of the "vocational thinking culture" concept and presents its components specifying the structure of this concept. The author also describes criteria, indicators and characteristics of levels of vocational thinking culture development; some testing materials were used to find out the level of vocational thinking culture and some results of the experiment at considering and evaluation stages of the experimental work were included in the article. The testing materials described in the work allowed to determine students’ levels of development of the vocational thinking culture. The developed criteria and indicators are of theoretical and practical importance for further research of vocational education problems.

The first in the history of education, collective consideration of all parts and features of activity-based learning paradigm in higher education (concepts, learning theories and methods of analysis or development of specific training based on theory) is presented in this article. Application of the theory is provided by procedural guide to the implementation of activity-oriented teaching methods for the first time in the practice of secondary and higher school. Bibliography of author’s works on all stages of the paradigm’s development is also presented in this article.

The author proposes a new system of physical quantities and dependences that could be used in teaching physics. The author describes dimensional fundamentals of the multilevel system of physical quantities and the principle of determination and visualization of dependences, and also provides samples of such visualization for three divisions of physics: mechanics, thermal and emitting quantities and electromagnetic quantities and dependencies. The most valuable part of the system is that its users who understand the uniqueness of the system’s multilevel nature and formal rules of exploring dependencies could easily find dependences which present natural relationships. This way they can avoid thoughtless memorizing of numerous physical formulas. Furthermore, the skill of creating formulas from other formulas, which can be difficult for engineering students, becomes less important and not necessary.

Vocational education is being actively re-oriented to educational programs that shape students' competence. Transformation is related to objectives, contents, conditions and educational organization which is based on regional characteristics of labor market, employers demands to the level and quality of graduates in engineering industry.

This article is devoted to the competence approach in vocational education in modern informational society. Basic categories of competence approach and relations between them were defined in this article, the issue of description of competence in the system of methodological analysis was mentioned; approaches to the concept of “key competences” are described. Multilevel informational competence was considered as one of the key competences. As a result of the comparative analysis of common cultural and vocational competences of the manager the relation between informational and vocational competences was shown.

 This article deals with the application of information models for different educational purposes and composing methodical recommendation based on their quality  estimations. Also the method for determination of visibility of the information representation is described. This method satisfies the state educational modern standard of distance learning «Nanoengineering». This standard defines new principles of training the specialists.