The paper deals with the issue of evaluation and assessment of university students' research skills. The reason of insufficient development of these qualities is the absence of efficient teaching methods contributing to the transformation of acquired knowledge to the skills of carrying out research activities according to the curriculum. Based on the students' behavior characteristics the technique for the development of research skills has been designed, implementedinto the educational process and experimentally checked. In the process of assessing the students' cognitive abilities the differential approach was applied which helped to select the students to deal with research work.