A Mental Approach to Digital Transformation of Education
Authors: Pak N. I. 
Published: November 2021

Purpose of the study. The rapid and widespread dissemination of digital technologies in society necessitates the fastest and most effective digital transformation of education. The processes of digitalization of education face difficulties associated with unreasonable updates of the means and methods of electronic and distance learning in traditional methodological systems, the unpreparedness of teaching staff for professional activities in the new realities, laboriousness and large material and intellectual costs. In this regard, innovative approaches are of interest to achieve greater efficiency in the digital transformation of the educational process. The work is devoted to the substantiation of a mental approach that develops and complements the principles of modern didactics in the digital transformation of education, and provides an update of the means and methods of teaching using mental technologies.Methodology and methods. The mental approach is built on the foundation of mental schemes that define reality and a person from the position of his mentality, formed as a result of his individual and collective life experience. In the digital era, the approach determines the mechanisms for achieving new goals of education, such as the formation and development in a person of computa- tional, structural, intuitive, algorithmic thinking. The basis of the mental approach is made up of mental learning technologies that use various subject mental structures, concept and mind maps, suggesting a qualitative and meaningful change and correction of individual knowledge mental schemes. Considering learning with the help of mental schemes and mental models, the principles of mental didactics are formulated.Results. The contours of the mental approach in education, which allows the organization of the educational process on the basis of the means and methods of teaching, based on the foundation of mental schemes of thinking, are outlined. It provides a real opportunity to implement the principles of person-centered learning, for example, through the “transparent” box model, mental learning primitives, inverted resources and transforming resources, as well as mental technologies. The method of algorithmic primitives for the development of structural thinking is described. New approaches to the presenta- tion of electronic educational resources in an inverted form and in a transformer format have been substantiated.Conclusions. The importance of the mental approach manifests itself in several directions: the application of the “transparent box” model in teaching and control of knowledge; the use of teaching primitives to design structural-mental schemes for learning problem solving; crea- tion of personalized educational resources in the format of transformers and inverted textbooks that best match the mentality of the digital generation; the possibility of implementing person-centered learning. The approach allows the formation and development of mental didactics to ensure the effectiveness of the digital transformation of education, facilitates the achievement of the cognitive goals of subject learning and can effectively meet the modern requirements of the digital society for education.