CC BY
180
A COMPETENCE-BASED APPROACH AS A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF EDUCATION QUALITY
M. T. Kadralinova
Competence in the conditions of solving the main problem of education, improving education quality, is regarded as an integral manifestation of personality traits. It reflects a person's knowledge and general cultural levels, the experience of practical activities and professional creativity of a future specialist.
Key words: competence, education, quality, innovative, professional, personality, activities.
The basis for building an efficient innovative system is human capital, which is one of the most important competitive advantages of Kazakhstan. A prerequisite for it is the adaptation of the educational system for the purposes of shaping the knowledge, competences, skills and behavior models needed for innovative economy in students, and the creation of a system of continuous education. A competence-based approach permits one to choose the content of vocational education in conformity with the needs of the developing personality; at the same time, it is focused on the innovative experience of successful professional activity in a specific industry. Competence in the context of solving the main problem of education, improving the quality of teaching, is viewed as an integral manifestation of personal qualities. It reflects the knowledge and general cultural levels, a future specialist’s experience of practical activities and professional creativity. Thereby, education takes quite a new form, the principle of which is teaching independent, self-confident persons that have sufficient competencies for self-realization and eliciting their potential in subsequent life.
During the period of college tuition, personal knowledge as the basis for professional competences is shaped through active forms and methods with the help of innovative teaching aids in the process of absorbing and mastering professionally focused knowledge. Professional competence is composed of the knowledge, expertise and skills acquired in the process of learning or professional activities. Subsequently, during various periods of professional activities, they are gradually improved in the process of continuous education. The task of a competence-based approach in education is to teach how to study, i.e. to teach how to determine the goals of cognitive activity, to choose sources of information, to find the optimum routes to one's goal, to assess result and to organize one's activities on one's own, to find one's bearings in the world of spiritual values and the core problems of the modern age. To teach how to solve the problems of socialization, the problems connected with professional activities. The competence-based approach is focused on the solution of the principal problem of contemporary education: improving the quality of education. Finding a solution to this problem is connected with the modernization of education content, the optimization of the methods and techniques of educational process organization and, of course, rethinking the goal and result of education.
367
The problem of assessing the result of education is always urgent. Yesterday, it was associated with the concepts of "education standard", "general cultural level", "social training". Today, a sharp change of focus takes place, emphasis is put on the competence approach in education, and the concept of "a specialist's expertise" becomes relevant. Researchers studying the theme of a competence approach in education state that the difference between a competent specialist and a qualified one is that the former not only has some amount of knowledge, expertise and skills, but is also capable of putting them into practice in his or her work. It is known that a competence-based approach in education arose as an alternative to abstract theoretical knowledge, with the goal of developing practice oriented qualities that students need in their social life and professional activities. This is a conceptually new approach that requires rethinking the attitudes to a teacher's position and to training students. Furthermore, a competence-based approach should be viewed as a contemporary synthesis of such traditional approaches as the culturological, scientific and educational, functional and communicative and didactic ones. A competence-based approach is an attempt at bringing mass education and the needs of labor markets in harmony, an approach with a focus on the result of education; whereupon the result is viewed not as the sum of ingested information, but as man's ability to act in various situations.
The goal of contemporary vocational education is to train a qualified specialist having the appropriate training standards and specialization who is competitive on the labor market, competent in his/her profession, and able to find his/her bearings in allied spheres of activities, prepared for permanent improvement of his/her skills, and is socially and professionally flexible. The goal of the competence-based approach introduction to the system of vocational education is to improve interaction with the labor market and competitiveness of specialists. It becomes necessary to create conditions for shaping a student's experience of solving problems facing him/her independently, and for assessing the results of education on the basis of analysis of the achieved level of education, i.e. at the level of his/her competence. Educational competence is understood as the totality of a student's conceptual attitudes, knowledge, expertise, skills and hands-on experience in relation to a certain range of actual reality objects that are needed for carrying out personally and socially significant practical activities. A peculiar feature of pedagogic competence developing techniques is that they take shape not as a teacher's actions, but from the point of view of the results of a trainee's activity, i.e. his/her advance and development in the process of acquisition of certain social experience. The priority method of transforming theoretical knowledge into practical one is practice. Carrying out professional tasks in practice is planned throughout the period of a specialists' professional training. Mastering competencies as a new type of goal setting means changing the educational policy of educational institutions towards the interests of the labor market and mastering the "lifelong" education paradigm. The main idea of the new approach is that continuous education becomes a principle of the educational system, and an individual's participation in it throughout the whole continuous process of his/her educational activity. A competence-based approach as an imperative of continuous education requires the training of a specialist who possesses not only special knowledge, but certain qualities of competitiveness, professional flexibility, the
368
ability to switch labor types rapidly, and to combine various labor functions. Whereupon the most important factor is to meet a trainee's educational needs by creating conditions for his/her obtaining general cultural and professional competences that are in demand on the part of industry and society, and comprehensive development of a human being as a person throughout his/her life, improving the potential of his/her labor and social adaptation in a rapidly changing world.
Kazakhstan is integrated in the European and global educational space in compliance with global tendencies, and it joins the processes of education modernization and also proclaims the priority of continuous education in the interests of sustainable development.
References
1. Аношкина В. Л., Резванов С. В. Образование. Инновация. Будущее. - М., 2001.
2. Вербицкий А. А., Ларионова О.Г. Личностный компетентностный подход в образовании: проблемы интеграции. - М.: Логос, 2009.
3. Государственная программа развития Республики Казахстан на 2011-2020 гг. - Астана, 2010.
4. Сластенин В. А., Исаев И. Ф., Шиянова Е. Н. Педагогика: учеб. пособие для студ. / под ред. В.А. Сластенина). - М.: Академия, 2002.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
369
