Integrity of Pedagogical Experiment in the Context of Modernization of Russian Education

Abstract

Current modernization of Russian education lacks technological basis, involves serious ambiguity, and generates new questions and problems. This situation is predetermined by the transformation of educational channels not accompanied by changes in their architectonics and interaction with the new culture. Education and culture interact within two major areas: interaction between social and cultural institutions, and influence of social factors on education, these factors being generated by development of the modern society. In contemporary Russia the federal educational bodies — the Ministry of Education and Science — dynamically respond to the challenges of time. Since the effect of these challenges is a mechanism of developing the ambiguity, the Ministry mostly stands against this ambiguity and not against the existing objective laws of social development. Therefore, the results of modernization in education cannot be definitely predicted. Even a well-organized pedagogical experiment always includes a subjective factor, since pedagogical activity normally involves two subjects — a student and a teacher. Thus, the problem of the integrity of pedagogical experiment which is directly connected with the status of pedagogical science comes to the forefront. The status of the science predetermines the goals of the pedagogical experiment: this experiment is supposed either to support the major ideas of the pedagogical theory or to become a means of collecting empiric data to be theoretically consolidated later. Indefinite goals and tasks of the experiment dramatically reduce the degree of integrity of the results obtained. The number of experiment participants serves another indicator of the integrity of pedagogical experiment. In collecting empirical data the social sciences consider the regularity between the total amount of respondents (sampled population) and the error (sampling error); the main feature of the sampling — its representativeness — is also monitored. Pedagogical sciences possess no information or recommendations of this kind. Another indicator of the integrity of pedagogical experiment and its results involves interactions between the teacher (experiment conductor) and the students (the subjects of experiment) which do not exclude pedagogical risks in the experiment and impossibility of applying the models obtained in the pedagogical experiment in their teaching practices. The federal standards of the third generation applied in modern higher education offer wide variability of curricula and educational content. Therefore, the results of innovative activity will directly depend on the professional level of teachers, i. e. on the purely subjective factor.