Creating a psychologically comfortable educational environment as a factor of successful academic program acquisition by technical university students

Abstract

The paper analyses two psychological and pedagogical concepts, namely, the need- informational theory of emotions and the self-determination theory. These theories are focused on the priority of the students' activity. Thus, the educational process should create opportunities for a student to predict a result of his/her activity and to give it a predominant status. It is also necessary to develop an environment intended to demonstrate independence and creativity, focus on positive emotions and a need for self-respect, as well as to maintain an acceptable level of anxiety. The target criterion is to provide a psychologically comfortable educational environment. From this perspective, we described and analysed our experience of a transdisciplinary approach to teaching the Russian Language and Business Communication course, as well as to the blended learning technique for teaching the Informatics and Information Technology in Radioelectronics and the Mathematical Analysis courses. The former case demonstrated a qualitative effect of mini-research tasks performed by the students. As for the latter case, we carried out several experiments that detected a significant difference of the examination scores with higher grades and lower anxiety level in the experimental groups (as compared to the control ones).