Educational Expanse And Value Orientations Of University Students’ Educational Activity

Abstract

The article deals with the problem that the educational expanse of a university from the perspective of subject description has not been sufficiently examined. In this description the educational expanse is viewed as an object of people's subject activity, participating in educational activity. Students are full participants of the educational expanse, and their subject activity can become a resource for its development. The realization of this possibility depends on the students' awareness of their subject role in this process and the ability to be the author and master of their life path. We justify an objective necessity to define the hierarchy of students' value orientations, reflecting the personal significance of various activities for students. Following this hierarchy, students determine the goals and directions of their activity. A specially developed technique aimed at identifying the types of activities in which university students can participate is described. We perform procedures that provide the identification of the hierarchy of students' value orientations reflecting the personal significance of the activities for students. The diagnostic tools are described; they make it possible to form the considered hierarchy. The results of processing and analysing a mass of data obtained from 138 respondents are presented. It is shown that the gender factor affects neither the process of a pairwise comparison of various types of students' activities, nor the process of forming their strict hierarchy. Clusters of students are determined by the degree of proximity of distributions that characterize the frequency of choosing the types of activity.