INCREASING COGNITIVE MOTIVATION OF AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF COURSE PROJECTS

Cognitive motivation is an essential part of the personality structure of an active, creative, competent specialist who is capable of self-development. There is great demand for such specialists in agriculture at present. Therefore, the development of cognitive motivation of students remains a relevant task of modern agricultural education. The paper shows that the method of course projects is highly promising in terms of increasing cognitive motivation of students. When students perform a course project solving a number of diverse and at the same time personally signifi cant problems they show cognitive activity and creativity. When organizing this kind of learning activity, teachers should follow a systematic approach and to comply with the following
conditions: the themes of course projects should be interesting and practice-oriented, methodical ecommendations should provide full information support to students regarding planning and making the right layout of the project. The paper shows the role of the themes of course projects for increasing the cognitive motivation of students and describes the structure and content of the corresponding methodical recommendations for students. The authors present the research results on the changes in the development level of cognitive motivation differentiated according to three criteria: regulatory, content-activity,
and emotional. The experiment was conducted in three stages and showed a signifi cant increase in cognitive motivation among students performing their course projects.