European Journal of Contemporary Education

263-271

Authors: Henry Adusei, Jacob Owusu Sarfo, Portia Manukure, Josephine Cudjoe

Teachers form one of the essential professional groups in the development domain of every country. Although most senior high school teachers in Ghana complains about poor conditions of service, a lot of them are still at post. The key research goal was to explore the retaining factors of senior high school teachers, within their existing demotivating Ghanaian socioeconomic context. Eighteen individual interviews were conducted among senior high school teachers in the Eastern Region using an interview guide. By means of an Inductive Content Analysis, three major themes emerged; (a) teachers’ retention factors, (b) teachers’ motivation factors and (c) Helping factors. It is remarkable that, motivation to these participants did not necessarily mean job satisfaction and job retention. Intrinsic motivation was rather perceived as influencing job performance while extrinsic motivations were needed to retain them. In general, the absence of these extrinsic motives were replaced with other retention factors like less tress at work, increasing liberty at work, and absence of alternative employment opportunities.

284-294

Authors: Valentin P. Babintsev, Viktor А. Sapryka, Yana I. Serkina, Galina F. Ushamirskaya

This article discusses changes that actually occur in the Russian Higher Education in the process of reform. The thesis that the functioning of the educational system increasingly detects formal rationality, not focused on the senses, and their imitation. It is noted that the Russian system of higher education refers to a specific type, which can be rightly defined as “culture-centric”. This type have a number of traits: dominance conception of education as a complex of practices, with the aim of translation of cultural codes from older to younger generations; the idea of the sacred nature of the educational process as a student-deterministic; installation of universality, according to which university graduates must be not only professionally prepared and fully developed; priority of content and semantic aspects of education in relation to formal, often even to the detriment of the latter; belief in the special position of the higher education sector, as well as education in general in relation to other spheres of activity. It is emphasized that the logical consequence of the transition to the formal rationality becomes a management simulation in which real values and meanings are replaced and replaced by a formal reproduction of operations and procedures, followed by their demonstration, declaration and decoration. It is proved that the main source of formal rationalization is a corporate bureaucracy. What evidence, unwarranted expansion of the administrative apparatus of the university, which is a logical consequence of the formalization of the educational process, excessive standardization and regulation of educational activities, as well as the deformation of the controlling function.

311-323

Authors: Milka Elena Escalera-Chávez, Arturo García-Santillán, Arturo Córdova-Rangel, Santiago González-Gómez, Esmeralda Tejada-Peña

The aim of this research work is to analyze whether there is a difference in the degree of anxiety towards mathematics among students of different educational levels. The study is not-experimental and cross sectional, and it is based on difference of means between groups. The sample is not-probabilistic, and consisted of 226 students from Tuxtepec, Mexico of different educational levels: basic, middle, upper-middle and upper. For this purpose, the questionnaire designed by Muñoz and Mato-Vázquez (2007) was utilized. It comprises five factors: anxiety toward evaluation, anxiety toward temporality, anxiety toward understanding of mathematical problems, anxiety about numbers and mathematical operations, anxiety toward mathematical situations of the real life. The results shows that anxiety toward mathematics is different by level of study, that significant differences exist between groups, and that anxiety toward assessment is higher among upper, upper-middle and middle levels, while for elementary students there is no perceptible anxiety toward mathematics.

335-343

Authors: Evgeny A. Naumenko, Olga N. Naumenko

This article is based on the data cultivated from a teaching experiment carried out in one of the institutions in the city of Tyumen. The purpose of the experiment was to determine the necessity for education of religious and national tolerance through the study of special disciplines of the confessional and ethno-cultural content, for removing psychological barriers to religious and formation of a multicultural consciousness in the future. The authors emphasizes that the increase in tolerance level involves the use of teaching methods rooted into the structure of the educational process, the result of which would be the change of personal characteristics within an individual. Such personality changes included the system of relations, values and general outlook. This article deals with the impact of forms and methodical possibilities on the correction of inter-ethnic and inter-religious interaction of students, their normal behavior in different social situations. To appreciate the realization of this purpose, the authors developed a course on «Religions of the region under study». He emphasized the requirements of the educational standard which determines the necessity to study history, culture and religion of the region under study for the specialty «Regionalstudies» in the sphere of religious and interfaith relations. Historical and cultural aspects of the course content are harmoniously integrated into the context of religious relations. The experiment had been running for over four years and had shown positive benefits in the dynamics of formation confessional tolerance for students and elements of a multicultural consciousness.

357-367

Authors: Victoria A. Shershneva, Lyudmila V. Shkerina, Valery N. Sidorov, Tatiana V. Sidorova, Konstantin V. Safonov

The article presents the theoretical framework for a competency-based approach in higher education. It shows that the general didactic principles of professional direction, interdisciplinary connections, fundamentalization and informatization form the didactic basis for the competency-based training in university. The article also actualizes the integrated use of effective approaches to training, namely, competency-based, contextual, interdisciplinary, fundamental and subject-information approaches to training, among which the competency-based approach is leading. The basic organizational and pedagogical conditions promoting the formation of competence are defined in the form of the organization of polycontextual modules in training. Besides, the article outlines the ways to enhance the effectiveness of e-learning in the future.