Development of primary school prospective teachers’ project competence in the process of higher education

The paper considers some results of a fundamental research devoted to development of primary school prospective teachers’ project competence in the process of higher education. The authors reveal the relevance of the pedagogical design study and students’ project activities. The paper contains advantages of the design paradigm of education, competence model of teaching. The authors reveal the problem of prospective teachers’ project competence development in the unity of system, cultural, activity and personality-oriented approaches. The paper proposes a definition of a teacher project competence, a structure of a project competence, as well as the author’s model of development of primary school prospective teachers’ project competence in the process of higher education, and highlights blocks, stages, components, criteria and levels. The authors have developed indicators of three levels of teachers’ project competence development. The paper describes in detail the experimental work on prospective teachers’ project competence development: methodical approaches to the organization of the experiment are described, methods, stages are listed and tasks of the experiment by stages are revealed. The paper also presents the authors’ technology of project competence development, it identifies three modules: socio-cultural, psychological and pedagogical. The paper describes in detail the results and analysis of the final stage of the experimental work: empirical data of several sections, qualitative analysis of the results in the experimental and control groups.