Assessing students’ research competencies with the main focus on the level and direction of their development

Introduction. The article presents an analysis of approaches to the problem of effective assessment of university students’ research competencies. The purpose of the article is to reveal and demonstrate the results of adopting the inventory for assessing students’ research competencies, focusing on the level and direction of their development. Materials and Methods. The research is based on the application of a systematic approach and contextual methods in the assessment and development of university students’ research competencies. The authors applied comparative and retrospective analysis, systematization and generalization of existing approaches and methods for assessing students’ research competencies, which allowed them to develop and propose a content-based inventory. The empirical part of the study was conducted at the Department of Labor Economics and Personnel Management at Ural State University of Economics. More than 80 full-time students took part in the research by testing the inventory. The results of the empirical testing are presented using the tools of descriptive statistics, Spearman's correlation analysis, and Student's t-test determination. Results. Based on reviewing scholarly literature, the authors substantiate the importance of involving students in research activities and the development of research competencies (RC) as competitive advantages in the labor market. On the basis of generalization, a number of research approaches to the development and application of methods for assessing students’ RC are revealed. As a result, the authors present a six-component questionnaire for assessing research competencies as the basis of a comprehensive and personalized approach to the development of students’ potential, including: theoretical-information, cognitive, communicative, motivational-organizational, operational-activity and reflexive-prognostic components. The effectiveness of the inventory is proved by its content validity and the results of a two-stage approbation of the questionnaire in groups of students with and without research experience. The results of empirical testing of the inventory confirm that with comprehensive, contextual and systematic approaches to the assessment of research competencies containing personal recommendations for their development, the indicators for all 6 components of RC increase. Conclusions. The study concludes that there are many approaches to the assessment of RC and each of the methods can be relevant to the research tasks in the case of complexity and consistency. The six-component inventory has passed the stage of content validation and has shown relevance to the tasks of assessing university student’ research competencies with the main focus on the level and direction of their development.