Integral cognitive tasks as a means of schoolchildren’s meta-subject competences development and evaluation

The paper is devoted to the urgent problem of schoolchildren’s meta-subject competences development, which requires optimal methodological approaches identification and specific teaching tasks development. The authors, on the basis of a categorical-conceptual apparatus analysis of a competence-based approach to learning, identify and analyze characteristic features of didactic means used for these competences development. The paper discusses a possibility of integral cognitive tasks use as a means of schoolchildren’s meta-subject competences development for teaching natural science subjects, in particular, Chemistry. The paper also presents principles for integrated cognitive tasks development, contains their characteristics as well as examples of such tasks. An important condition for meta-subject competences evaluation is the choice of tools that allow them to carry out a comprehensive diagnosis. The authors have shown that it is possible to use integral cognitive tasks for assessing the level of schoolchildren’s meta-subject competences development. They also provide diagnostic tools and present an example of task assessment. The paper discusses meta-subject results; their achievement is possible when teaching Chemistry at a secondary school, an attempt is made to correlate them with meta-subject competences. The results of an experimental test allow us to speak about the effectiveness of the developed system application at a secondary school if integral cognitive tasks are used as a complex in the educational process.