Making managerial decisions in the process of mastering mathematical disciplines by students as a quasi-professional competence
The direction of the contemporary professional education development is oriented towards the realization of the competence-based approach to education. Each educational discipline has its specific competence-developing potential. Due to underdevelopment of the ideas of competence-oriented education in the pedagogical theory and practice, development, studying, implementation, measuring results of the education process targeted towards students' mastering of necessary competences, turns into a complicated pedagogical problem. The primary task in the context of this problem is distinguishing and modelling competences that are impossible to master within particular disciplines. In this article the notion of a quasi-professional competence named "Development and making of quasi-managerial decisions applying elements of system analysis and mathematical modelling" is clarified. When structuring the content of the competence under research, the following components are sorted out: motivation related (demands, motives, aims, values, senses, value-sense orientation); cognitive (possession of theoretical knowledge of the matter of mathematical disciplines); operational (the skills of integrating theoretical knowledge from various disciplines and applying them for development and making of managerial decision); reflexive-effective (skills, experience as a premise and result of the competence formation); professionally important personality features propitious for the development and making effective decisions: reflexiveness, independence, initiative, consciousness. The criteria of mastering the competence correspond to the components and can be concretised by a number of indicators. The indicators of the motivationrelated criterion are the following: distinctive interest towards the result and process of decision development and making, determination, positive attitude towards quasi-professional activity, understanding the necessity and the value of scientific approach to decision grounding, desire to develop decision technologically in unnecessary situations, understanding the sense of quasi-professional activity, necessity to assign values and giving sense to objects of internal and external reality. The indicators of the cognitive component are the following: amount, durability, depth, flexibility, reproducibility, generalization, portability, efficacy, integrity of knowledge, as well as diversity and efficiency of methods of its presentation and assignation. The integrative indicator of the operational component is the adequacy of the results of activity (quasi-professional decision) to the cultural norms. Maturity of the reflexive-effective criterion becomes apparent in judgments, peculiarities of the process and the results of activity. Professionally important personality features are revealed and fixed in respec tive indicators of quasi-professional activity. The structural-content model of a competence is an information base for further research: projecting pedagogical conditions, building structural-layered model of development, and studying dynamics.