RESEARCH ACTIVITY AS A WAY OF STIMULATING PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ COGNITIVE ACTIVITY

Current stage of education development is characterized by increasing attention to school youth’s education and upbringing, creating appropriate conditions for the realization of personality intellectual and creative potential of the growing up generation. An important role in this process belongs to the New Ukrainian School. Namely, as the effectiveness of its functioning, as a socially determined pedagogical system aimed at providing for the students’ creative needs in the process of research activity, formation of their creative activity, independence and creative culture. Research activity is considered as an activity aimed primarily at obtaining new knowledge for a teacher in order to find ways and means to improve pedagogical process. Future teacher’s pedagogical competence regarding research activities is defined as a unity of the following components: the motivational; the content; the operational; the integrational. Analysis of methodological literature of the research makes it possible to clarify the content of “research activity” concept, which we understand as a kind of cognitive activity that uses educational research as the main means of achieving educational result. Research activity predicts an active cognitive position related to periodic and lasting internal search, the work of mental processes, deeply meaningful processing of information, action through “trial and error”, personal discoveries. In the New Ukrainian School attention is paid to the development of students’ research skills such as hypothesis building, planning, arranging observations, collecting and processing information, using and transforming information to acquire new conclusions, integrating the content of several fields of knowledge. Main purpose of a research workshop is to form a propaedeutic system of scientific concepts, research skills, mastering of which will allow a primary school student to feel the joy of discovering new knowledge, knowledge of oneself and the world around. The gradual development of students’ research experience is provided by the extension of carried out operational actions while completing educational research tasks and increasing activity difficulty – from frontal under teacher’s guidance to individual independent activities. Involvement of students in research activities should be flexible, differentiated, based on the features of the manifestation of the children’s individual research experience. Research activity is a progressive form of studying that allows pedagogue to reveal and develop students’ personal intellectual abilities. Unlike reproductive activities research activities give the student much more freedom of mental activity. Opportunity to choose one’s own subject activity stimulates the child to independently analyze the results and consequences of the activities. Each result achieved generates reflection, the consequence of which becomes the emergence of new plans and ideas, which are further specified and embodied in a new research. Thus, research work in primary school (and in the study of natural science in particular) allows us to conclude that it will be effective under the following pedagogical conditions: ensuring continuity in carrying out experiments and observations of nature in primary school; purposeful teaching of educational observation and experimentation methods to students; taking into account the age and individual psychological characteristics of primary school students; optimal combination of reproductive and creative approaches in the organization of research and educational experiments; the directions of research work offered to students should be various; research topics should be practice-focused and interesting to students.