THE PHENOMENON OF “ADAPTATION LEARNING” IN HIGHER EDUCATION: ANALYSIS AND DEFINITION CONSTRUCTION

Introduction. The difference between higher education and school education, which consists in a different content and conditions of the organization of the educational process, in the emergence of new social relations, often becomes the reason that the first-year student is not ready for the new conditions of study at the university. Along with psychological and physiological adaptation, researchers single out the academic (educational) adaptation of students, which can cause poor academic performance in various university disciplines. At the same time, we note that the initial (basic) training of students is practically not taken into account at the beginning of their studies at the university: the university program is not designed for very weak students. As a result, first-year students “adapt” to the peculiarities of educational activities (to new content, methods and means), but students also influence the educational environment of the university: the teacher has to look for new methodological approaches and more advanced teaching methods. As a result, adaptive training has emerged in universities, which is designed to eliminate the main reason for the poor academic performance of students due to the low initial preparation of the applicant. Successful integration into the core curriculum and successful mastery of the curriculum of the university discipline in the future is the main criterion for the effectiveness of adaptive learning.The purpose of the article is to identify and describe the nature of the phenomenon of “adaptation learning”, to eliminate ambiguity of this term, and to present its proper scientifically grounded definition.The materials and methods of the study are the method of content analysis of definitions, analysis and comparison, classification, formal-logical method of concept definition.Results and discussion. A brief description of the development of the didactic approach to the concept of “adaptation” is presented. An analysis of the definitions of adaptation education available in the literature (adaptation training, adaptation workshop, adaptation course, adaptation work) and concepts related, but not identical to it (corrective training, corrective course, alignment course) are made. The conducted content analysis revealed the diversity of researchers’ approaches to the issue and emphasizes the uncertainty and inconsistency. In this regard, the need for a definition that will adequately reflect the essential characteristics of the issue has been identified. The result of formal-logical definition: adaptation learning is the training of specialists having initially different level of competence formation (from zero to low), in order to achieve in a certain period of time the required basic level (minimum necessary) for further training.Thus, basically, it can be concluded that the study contributes to the development of the phenomenon. The identification of differentiating features made it possible to separate the concept of “adaptation learning” from similar concepts. The constructed definition can become the basis for determining the content and developing programs of adaptation courses in different disciplines studied in universities.

adaptation learning, adaptation to higher education, initial training of students, formal-logical method, training of highly qualified specialists