Assessment Of The Process Of Acquiring Professional Competencies By Students

Abstract

According to federal state educational standards of higher professional education, students acquire certain competencies in the learning process. Assessing the degree of their development is a rather difficult task. It should be borne in mind that competencies are acquired by students not immediately, but gradually, while mastering several disciplines. To solve this problem, modeling the learning process as a process of the system functioning will help. The modeling of such a process must be dynamic and therefore Petri nets can be used. This work is devoted to the description of the possibility of using Petri nets to solve this problem. When developing the model, a number of limitations and hypotheses were accepted. In particular, the quality of the acquired learned competencies is expressed by a dimensionless value, the actual level of acquired competences by the learner is determined by assessment tools during the passage of disciplines and practices. When creating, an attempt was made to take into account the fact that each academic discipline has the goal of mastering a certain part of the group of competencies and all disciplines are logically connected. As a result of modeling, the relative change in competencies as a result of students' training was studied.

Keywords: Learning process, disciplines studied, competencies, modelling, Petri nets

Introduction

The introduction of federal state educational standards (FSES) in institutions of higher professional education is based on the implementation of the competence-based approach (Efremova, 2017). The competence-based approach in pedagogical activity is usually understood as a methodological orientation, which allows, by relying on a system of interrelated concepts, ideas and methods of action, to provide and support the development of a unique individuality, the development of thinking and speech, independence and personality culture (Atanov et al., 2015; Nazmutdinov & Yusupova, 2013). Competence in FSES is understood as the ability of students to apply knowledge, skills, personal qualities and practical experience for successful activities in a particular area (Kononova et al., 2013). The pedagogical process becomes focused on the acquisition of universal (CC), general professional (OPK) and professional competencies (PC) by students. The greatest difficulty is the development of methods and tools for assessing the level of competence formation (Marina et al., 2018; Vasilieva, 2017). A lot of works are devoted to the teaching of disciplines, in which this process is considered in detail, but the methods of quantitative assessment, which allow automating the process of monitoring the acquisition of competencies and the compliance of the level of competencies with the requirements of employers, have been given much less attention, and at the moment there is no single system of quantitative assessment of general cultural and professional competencies. graduate (Atanov et al., 2015; Kononova et al., 2013; Marina et al., 2018; Pirskaya, 2012; Vasilieva, 2017). A review of Russian sources on the development of models for measuring the integral educational results of university graduates revealed:

• their limited number. The works of Atanov et al. (2015), Belyaeva et al. (2018), Efremova (2017), Fortier and Michel (2003), Kononova et al. (2013), Nazmutdinov and Yusupova (2013), Yushin and Korogodina (2012) and others, in some moments close to the problem under study;
• the lack of a unified approach and universal criteria for the attainability of results, the difference in the units of measurement of the result;
• incompleteness of methods that give a visual representation and a quantitative indicator of the level of competence formation of a university graduate.

Problem Statement

The analysis of publications allows us to note that studies in the field of assessing the level of mastering competencies have not yet been sufficiently developed. The question of the practical application of the quantitative assessment of competencies has not been sufficiently studied, therefore the topic is interesting and promising for future research. In particular:

• Steps for the transition to competence-based learning in modern teaching practice;
• Identifying reliable means of measuring the quality of mastering competencies (qualitative or quantitative indicators).

Below we will look at each problem.

Research Questions

In course of the study the following questions were raised:

• How is competence formed in the process of teaching various disciplines?
• What competencies develop most quickly in the process of teaching students?
• How do the competencies change in each course of study of students?

Purpose of the Study

Supposedly, the answers to the issues raised above will help achieve the goal, contribute to the study the process of changing competencies during the training of students and help to identify the features of the development of competencies in different courses of study of students.

Research Methods

The author used universal methods of scientific research, as well as methods of comparative and statistical analysis. The work uses research methods to create a list of competencies formed in the process of teaching each discipline, statistical research methods to quantify competencies and modelling.

Heading Level 2

In this paper, we propose a model of the learning process, based on the fact that this process is probabilistic in nature, and under certain assumptions, the learning process can be represented as a kind of graph - a Petri net (Bobbio, 1990; Fortier & Michel, 2003; Malkov & Malygina, 2010). The Petri net is able to simulate one of the steps in the course learning process (reading theoretical material, answering questions, searching the Internet, preparing reports, etc.). Arcs between nodes simulate the sequence of steps. From the point of view of applications, the analysis of the dynamics of changes in the markings of the Petri net and the situations arising in this case is of the greatest interest. The Petri net marker simulates a portion of the data stream, and the position - the accumulation and storage of such portions. The data flow for the learning process under consideration is the competencies acquired by students in the course of learning. Since Petri nets allow using any objects, both material and non-material, as tokens. For the learning process, we will consider competencies as tokens in the Petri net model. The functionality of the Petri net makes it possible to determine the change in competencies, to somehow quantitatively characterize the process of accumulating competencies. Each chip denotes a conditional level of competence, which changes several times (conditionally).

To create a graph and calculate changes in the Petri net, you can use the specialized software CPN Tools. As can be seen in Figure 1 below, on the Petri net fragment, position st stores the student's competencies (denotes the student's knowledge), transition st - the beginning of training (the student entered the 1st year), positions and transitions are indicated by the numbers of the corresponding disciplines (positions 1 - 9 and transitions 1 - 9), transition 1-1 - denotes the beginning of the student's training in the 2nd year, transition 2-2 - means the beginning of the student's training in the 3rd year, transition 3-3 - means the beginning of the student's training in the 4th year. Before the start of training, students have some initial knowledge, competencies are formed at some level. Therefore, the work of the Petri net begins at position sd (Figure 1), which denotes the training of students to the university. Initially, position st contains the 1st conditional unit of each competency (one chip with the corresponding number). In the course of training, the student acquires the appropriate competencies, i.e. the number of chips with the corresponding number in position st changes. This process is indicated by tokens transmitted along arcs, i.e. competencies with corresponding numbers. The competencies that are required in the study of the relevant disciplines are taken from Table. 1 and are denoted by the corresponding tokens transmitted along arcs from the position to the transition. The competencies that are formed in the study of the relevant disciplines are taken from Table 2 and are indicated by the corresponding tokens transmitted along arcs from the transition to the position. In addition, in Figure 1 variable yk is used to denote all the competencies currently available to the student.

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Findings

As a result of the research, a model for obtaining competencies by students was proposed, which allows you to clearly see the change in the values ​​of competencies in the process of teaching students. If you look at the distribution of disciplines by years of study, then using the built-in model, you can assess the change in competencies. So, during the entire learning process, competencies 1 and 9 were increased 3 times, competence 4 - 2 times, competencies 9 and 10 - 3 times, competence 14 - 4 times. Thus, the study showed that competence develops the fastest 14.

Conclusion

The study points to the possibility of assessing the degree of mastery of competencies by students in the learning process. The developed model clearly demonstrates the process of teaching students, taking into account the study of various disciplines. In the course of the study, a methodology was proposed for quantitatively assessing the degree of mastering competencies in teaching students.

References

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