Interdisciplinary approach to teaching physics to students majoring in agrarian engineering and agronomy

Abstract

This study reports on interdisciplinary approach to teaching physics to the students majoring in agrarian and mechanical engineering. Physics plays a crucial role in mastering major disciplines by students of technical universities. Ukrainian higher education provides primarily mono-disciplinary approach to teaching academic and major subjects, so called teaching isolated disciplines. The interdisciplinary aspect of teaching physics corresponds to the requirements of modern society to educate competitive and qualified specialists in agricultural and engineering spheres. The study aims at defining the essence of interdisciplinary links between physics and major subjects, at specifying the peculiarities of job-focused physics tasks, at demonstrating the necessity of implementation the professional context in the process of studying. The paper investigates this issue by analyzing, comparing, systematizing the pedagogical literature.The study is based on monitoring and pedagogical experiment that proved the insufficient level of professional orientation of physics course. Pedagogical experiment was carried (out from 2014 to 2017). The students of State Agrarian and Engineering University in Podilya, Tavriyskiy State Agrarian University majoring in Agrarian Engineering and Agronomy and the students of Sumy National Agrarian University majoring in Agricultural mechanization took part in the survey. The sample involved 150 students. The study demonstrated such advantages of interdisciplinary approach to teaching physics through occupation-based task scenarios as student engagement and highly qualified specialists, subject interaction. The results of the experiment showed the insufficient level of professional competence of physics course. The material in this article, he patterns of physics course tasks accompanied by illustrations for students of mechanical engineering and agrarian departments, in particular, can be used in educational process.

Modernization of content of lecture course in physics to train future agricultural engineers

“…This problem may be solved in various ways. When selecting the content of the lecture material and structuring it, we widely use the principle of generalization [10], which assumes the selection of one or several main ideas and grouping the material around this idea. The material of the physics course is grouped around the physical theories.…”

“…Most of the investigations, connected with the course of lectures studied, show that the lectures allow the student to develop a positive attitude and curiosity towards science only if they have a relation to and examples of their future professional activity [7][8][9][10].…”

Study in possibilities of professional orientation in training of specialists in agrarian and technical universities

“…To address this issue researchers performed a number of studies on the formation of professional competence, revealed its basic principles and importance in the training of future specialists [1][2][3][4]. Researchers in their works focus on the professional training of masters in international affairs [5], border service students [6], medical physicists [7], and future agricultural production specialists [8], using an interdisciplinary approach.…”