CASE STUDY: EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF KNOWLEDGE COMPONENT OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS HUMANITARIAN CULTURE

Tis article analyzes the results of the experimental test that has been conducted at the MGIMO Politics and Governance Department to study and assess the general humanitarian cultural level of undergraduate students. Accepting a broader interpretation for this concept, that is predominant in the contemporary scientifc research, the authors focused on the knowledge component of the general humanitarian culture, understood as a set of concepts about history, geography, literature and art. Internalized knowledge of such kind forms cultural background enabling any dialogue, in our case “teacher – student”. To achieve the set goals, the authors of the study have developed a test – to evaluate the general humanitarian cultural level of freshmen and fourth-year students in compliance with the teachers’ expectations, thereby exposing a deep cultural gap between people of different generations. Te results obtained vividly show that current freshmen meet the expectations of the university professors in terms of general humanitarian knowledge by slightly more than 50% (the average test score is 52.5%), which can signifcantly impede the process of education. A qualitative analysis of the test results suggests that modern students, or millennials, live in a new cultural paradigm, triggered by global changes in our society. To optimize the teacher-student dialogue teachers must recognize the fact of discrepancy in cultural codes, abandon old stereotypes and just systematically work on reflling gaps in the general cultural level of students, which, as the experiment shows, can be successfully achieved by the Baccalaureate program (relative gain of knowledge by the 4th year equals 25%). Te comparison of the results for the two age groups of the tested students led to the conclusion that the cultural-linguistic element of the French language course is quite effective.

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