The Role of Project-Based Learning in the Training of Future Officers

Abstract

The article aims to identify project technologies’ effectiveness in forming future officers’ professional competence. Testing and a formative experiment were used as the research methods. The study was conducted with cadets of military educational institutions. Each project consisted of organisational, motivational, research and final stages, which included reflection on the acquired knowledge. Typical trends in the transformation of professional competence in military education were identified. The project-based learning method has been found to contribute to forming the communicative, managerial, motivational, and cognitive components of future officers’ professional competence. This method was least effective for forming the emotional and volitional components of future officers’ competence. In general, the research hypothesis about the effectiveness of the project method in training future officers was partially confirmed. The hypothesis about the dependence of the effectiveness of the project method on the course of study in future officers’ training was fully confirmed. The results can be used to improve the effectiveness of educational programmes for training future officers. Further prospects for the research are to study the relationship between the project method’s effectiveness and students’ psychological characteristics.