A Study of University Students’ Cognitive Competence in Performing the Learning Assignments: Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Approach

Abstract

One of the major tasks of today’s higher education schools—raising cognitively competent specialists—is still far from completion. Two University professors, a journalist and a psychologist, with different cultural backgrounds, united their pedagogical experience and the results of their long-term studies of the students’ cognitive functioning in performing learning assignments. These assignments were analogues of the problems which journalists and school teachers will have to solve eventually in their everyday professional practice. The results showed that most students in each investigated population had poor cognitive skills for working with textual information. Their mistakes in performing course work were systematic and similar. They were caused by an inability to identify key-words which most accurately point to the main ideas of the texts. Such students had no full-fledged understanding of what they read. To denote this phenomenon, the authors used the term “fuzzy thinking”. The authors concluded that today’s educators’ efforts should be aimed at teaching university students to work with textual information professionally. The necessary analytic and semantic skills should be instilled in students in every course, every semester, and throughout all years of university study.