An Environmental Approach to Developing and Applying Smart Complexes of Academic Disciplines in Professional Training of Future Specialists

Abstract

The paper discloses modern approaches to creating integrated information environments of SMART complexes of academic disciplines through integrating creative, authorial, non-verbal, encyclopaedic, information-and-communication, self-realization, self-assessment components in professional (vocational) and pre-university professional education. It lists the advantages of such complexes compared to e-textbooks and reveals the requirements for developing them. It highlights the ways of considering future specialists’ psycho-physiological development when selecting and structuring educational information. It recommends applying constructive equalization of students’ cognitive activity based on the Kosko’s quasi-neural network model in their designing an educational trajectory. It shows conditions for ensuring equal opportunities for students’ learning within such complexes. Both selection and structurization of such complexes’ educational information follow students’ psychological development in perceiving it and focus on critical feature patterns of the adaptive resonance theory and the Hopfield model for associative memory. The paper suggests evaluating students’ activities within such complexes by comparing each participant’s achievements with the parameters of completed projects, using the index method based on qualimetric measurements. It specifies the features of an environmental approach in developing such complexes; elaborating their educational material; determining types of learning tasks; creating means of monitoring students’ knowledge. It justifies the results of experimental work, which involved surveying 442 teachers and analyzes the influence of such complexes on the effectiveness of the educational process. It highlights the importance of introducing heuristic forms, methods and techniques of students’ learning to help students obtain, systematize and consolidate educational information and acquire practical skills in performing creative projects and professional tasks.