Essence and Contents of the Teacher’s Methodological Reflection
The article deals with the urgent necessity of improving the quality of pedagogical research by means of forming methodological culture of teachers and methodological reflection as its basic component. Methodological reflection is regarded as a critical analysis and evaluation of the process and result of one’s own research activity/activities of other researchers, the contents where it is being realized, from position of criteria of research quality in order to correct the existing activity and qualitative designing of further research. This analysis is based on the criteria of the quality of research aiming at improvement of the activities at hand and qualitative planning of further research. The article presents the essence and content of methodological reflection: methodological knowledge and skills characteristic of every stage of scientific pursuit. It is possible to single out the following groups of pedagogical research quality criteria by means of which a teacher estimates scientific activities: proper scientific criteria (cognitive character of the aim, identification of the subject matter of the research, use of special cognitive means, unambiguity of the main terms), methodological criteria (the system of methodological characteristics of the research as an integral quality factor), logical criteria (reasonableness of a thesis; systematic character of argumentation; correlation among the components of the system of concepts and terms; clarity, unambiguity and accuracy of theoretical propositions presented for defense, etc.), humanitarian criteria (man’s health as the superior value, objective truth as the highest moral value, absence of overload of a target group in educational practice, etc.).