Peculiarities of teaching students with mosaic thinking

Abstract

As the aim of the research, the author set the task of searching for new ways of conducting educational activity when teaching Project Management at the university taking into account the dominating mosaic thinking of modern students. There is a need to teach students of the given field logical thinking, the ability to work in the financial and humanitarian spheres of current business. In order to get a result, the analysis of the existing scientific views and approaches to teaching students with dominating mosaic thinking was conducted. The existing views by both Russian and foreign authors of mosaic thinking were considered, its different educational, psychological and philosophical aspects. As a result of the synthesis of the given approaches, taking into account the author’s inventions, proposals were developed on solving the problems of mosaic thinking in teaching students. Taking a constructive approach as a basis, the mosaic thinking is suggested to be considered as a phenomenon having both advantages and disadvantages. Changing the content of the educational process is done through updating standard methods and patterns of education, wide use of innovation approaches, intensifying cooperation and online collaboration of the teacher and the student in the process of study. The basis is formed by the emotional impact on the student in the course of studies, which will allow using logic and form the intention to learn the presented fact. Teaching Project Management to students is proposed taking into account their mosaic thinking, in four stages. During the lecture students receive a chain of images structured by the lecturer in the sequence embracing basic issues of the theme under consideration and presented in such a way as to inspire them to study the given questions independently. At the second stage, the students search for the solution of the assigned tasks in the course of independent work with the opportunities available for their level of perception. During the seminar classes (practical studies) at the third stage, the lecturer evaluates the quantity and quality of the solutions of practical tasks (case problems) found by the students. In the course of discussion, the students share their variants of solving practical problems, grounding the relevance of the proposed variants. At the fourth stage (midterm assessment – examination) the students develop a project as a whole or one of its stages, solving a set of interrelated practical problems. Since mosaic thinking is the reality of a new information society now, a conclusion was made of the necessity not to fight mosaic thinking, but to reorganize the educational process taking into account, on the one hand, the peculiarities of students having mosaic thinking, on the other hand, needs of business which requires project managers capable of both processing great amounts of information and arranging logical chains and determining cause and effect relationships. The given modification of education is proposed to be implemented in regards to changing the content of lectures and seminar classes, adding figurativeness and emotionalism into them, which will make it possible to set the cognitive activity of the students having mosaic thinking, and changing the direction and content of students’ independent work, setting the independent search for solving problems and case tasks as its goal.