Scientific journal
European Journal of Natural History
ISSN 2073-4972
ИФ РИНЦ = 0,301

METHODS OF SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL DIAGNOSTICS: ESSENCE AND REALIZATION FEATURES (EDUCATIONAL ASPECT)

Shilova V.S.

The most important problem of present-day higher education is the one of students´ training and mannerliness level quality. It is referred to all the orientations of professional training, including the aspect of students´ interaction with the environment, and education in this sphere. The last is conditioned by the necessity to form the readiness of all people to the establishment of optimal social-ecological relations of the corresponding competence.

A constituent part of the quality determination process is the examined object´s state diagnostics. Our research has allowed finding out the essence and features of one of its kinds considered. In general, the diagnostics in the sphere of learning youth´s social-ecological education supposes a purposeful determination of the learners´ state of readiness to the optimal interaction with the environment, education in the sphere of social ecological relations conditioned by pedagogical, psychological, social and social-ecological contexts. The pedagogical context supposes the maturity of necessary social-ecological knowledge, social-ecological skills, creative and emotionally axiological attitude to the environment; common pedagogical principles. The psychological context means the maturity of knowledge and skills in the area of general and developmental psychology; the directivity in the subject of psychology of attitude to nature (Yasvin V.A., Deryabo S.D.); the behavior and activity in it. The social context involves the maturity of knowledge, abilities and skills aimed at the identification of social conditions affecting the character of the interaction of personality and natural habitat; peculiarities of macro- and microenvironment creating a foundation of social-ecological culture. The ecological context supposes students´ preparedness for the environment quality assessment implementation (monitoring, control and modeling).

The students´ training level diagnostics in the area of social-ecological education of learning youth is a complex one, supposes the availability of academic knowledge of natural and human sciences, integrated science areas. The following should be referred to them in this case: ecology, geography, ecosystem exploitation, pedagogy, psychology, social ecology; the idea of research methods of these sciences, and also specific diagnostic methods. The purposes of the developed diagnostics are pedagogical ones, the implementation methodology has a sophisticated, complex character, supposes the use of methods of all the sciences necessary in this case.

The diagnostics object - is the students´ education in the area of interaction of the society and nature in the process of their chosen speciality acquirement. The diagnostics subject - is the state of students´ preparedness for social-ecological education of learning youth. The diagnostics subject matter is various aspects of both students´ social-ecological education proper, and the future pedagogical specialties students´ preparation for the education in the area of social-ecological relations under the conditions of educational institutions. Thereby, the subject matter of the diagnostics developed by us involves two principle blocks differing from each other by a specific filling.

The first block - the main one - includes the content of the social-ecological science and school children education in the area of the environment. It is focused on the definition of social-ecological knowledge and skills, creative and emotionally axiological attitude of students themselves, as it expands the basic culture of a personality in mutual relations with natural habitat, obtained at secondary school; strengthens the formative position in social-ecological interrelations; forms the persuasion of the necessity of further society-nature relations´ harmonization. The competence in the social ecology problems will let students form the correspondent knowledge in conditions of comprehensive educational institutions. It will also be promoted by the second component of the main block - the pedagogical one - revealing the foundations of the social-ecological education of school children: its purpose, informative and processual elements. In connection with it, the definition of student´s level of the essence and subject matter assimilation of these elements appears to be necessary.

The other block of the diagnostics considered by us is an additional one and is represented by knowledge and skills in the area of general and developmental psychology, geography, history and other particular methodics, problems of ecological pedagogy and psychology. The social knowledge, uncovering the functions of the society towards nature, the legal aspect among them, and also the regional knowledge and skills reflecting the peculiarities of the local population and the nature around it, is included into this block as well.

Summing up, let us emphasize that the diagnostics in the area of social-ecological education is a complex, many-component-in-matter process of defining of many-sided readiness of learning youth to the interaction with the environment, education of other population strata in this area, self-education. Various characteristics of learners at cognitive, activity and personality levels are identified in the social-ecological diagnostics; the attitude of the society to the problems of the society and nature interaction in global, regional and local scale is determined; the pedagogical process peculiarities, aimed at the formation of social-ecological readiness, are found out; the necessary conditions, affecting the specified parameters, are established. For example, defining the preparedness of students for social-ecological education of school children the state of their theoretical preparedness, the attitude to natural habitat and its optimization conditions, the relations with different competent social structures, the personal involvement of every student into practical workmanship in nature should be found out.

The diagnostics includes not only the content, but the corresponding methods as well. By the methods of social-ecological diagnostics we mean the ways of finding out its content´s principle elements, the defining of the essence and peculiarities of every element according to the predetermined criteria, factors and levels. The composition of social-ecological diagnostics methods is represented by the methods of social, psychological, pedagogical and ecological diagnostics. At that, the sought methods selection from these groups was performed by the way of revelation of the overall representation of any of the methods in every aggregate.

The specified diagnostics, particular methods of every of them have allowed defining the aggregate of the students´ social-ecological education diagnostics methods. They are represented by four main groups: monitoring, inquiry, mathematical methods, modeling. The monitoring includes the observation, valuation, content analysis, forecasting; the inquiry - the questionnaire, conversation, interview, testing; mathematical methods - statistical ones, the aggregate definition; the modeling - the analogue and logical ones, mental experiment.

Our further research are connected with finding out specific peculiarities of every of the methods, the conditions of their application in the pedagogical process of higher and general educational institutions.

The work was submitted to international scientific conference «Present-day problems of science and education», Russia, (Moscow), May, 13-15, 2008, came to the editorial office 10.01.2008.