THE APPLICATION OF THE THEORY OF FRACTALS FOR STUDYING THE REGULARITIES OF FORMING THE INFOSPHERE OF TRAINING APPLICANTS FOR NURSING SPECIALITIES

Abstract

The research stems from challenges which are characteristic of contemporary post-industrial, information and technological stage of development of human civilization. With respect to the initiation of training Masters of nursing in Ukraine a great importance is attributed to the research component of the professional competence of nurses with higher education, i.e. Masters of nursing. Taking into account the insufficient theoretical and methodical status of the problem, the researchers aim their study at developing a new approach to forming the infosphere of nursing as a research speciality on the basis of the theory of fractals. To achieve the goal the authors have used the content analysis of Master’s theses of 150 Masters in accordance with 112 indices, Hurst index calculation included. The calculated Hurst index values testify to a high level of structural organization of Master’s theses, as well as to certain regularities in using information sources in contrast with chaos and the absence of prevailing tendencies. The use of information sources which were referred to by the students of Master’s course for conducting research and writing Master’s theses, as well as the application of the techniques of content-analysis and scientific prognostication have made it possible to determine a number of tendencies in forming the infosphere of nursing as a research speciality. One can observe a pronounced tendency to decreasing the use of paper media as information sources, as well as the tendency to increasing the part of electronic media and the part of information sources in foreign languages. Among the information sources in foreign languages, in comparison with Russian English sources, prevail considerably. The study does not cover all aspects of the mentioned pedagogical problem since the further prospects for studying relates to the analysis of the quantity and quality of intellectual property objects created by the Masters enabling to formulate scientometric criteria for assessing the significance of scientific research of the Masters, thus revealing their ability to create the objects of intellectual property.