Due to the need to ensure economic growth and improving competitiveness of the Russian economy, the development of youth innovative entrepreneurship is relevant for our country. This requires not only the implementation of appropriate educational programs, but also selection of young people for admission on the basis of an effective assessment of their abilities and readiness to create an innovative business. The goal of the investigation is to design and test psychodiagnostic method that solves the problem of prompt assessment of students’ ability to innovative entrepreneurship. The test SINPRED is elaborated on the basis of the authored by Prokhorova and Belokon model of psychic determinants of effective entrepreneurial activity, connected with innovations. The test contains: instruction, 56 statements, the agreement with which the testee expresses on a seven-rank scale; key of primary data processing; normalized points (stens), worked out for two groups of testees (women and men); manual on processing and interpretation of diagnostics results. For empirical foundation of the methodics indices of students’ behavior, singled out by 5 experts, are used. Verification of discriminatory power, internal consistency, reliability of the test is carried out on the sampling of 180 students. 152 students comprise the sampling for evaluating of methodics validity. For defining the test factor structure and its standardization the results of 308 students questioning are utilized. It is revealed that the created test possesses a high level of discriminatory power and test-retest reliability. All test assignments are correlated with each other. The scales of the methodics have a sufficient level of validity. During the test approbation significant differences between women and men are unveiled on four primary scales: leadership, creativity, nonconformity, early entrepreneurial experience. The acquired differences additionally confirm discriminatory power and criteria validity of the test, and also indicate perspective of scientific investigations, that uncover peculiarities of determination and molding ability to innovative entrepreneurship, conditioned by sex.
Keyword(s) : intrinsic motivation
Overcoming Barriers in Teaching EFL to Non-Linguistic Students
The transition to the knowledge-based economy requires a new generation of professionals with a complex set of skills and competencies. These include English language skills, which will help them to merge into the international professional community. One dimension of this challenge is finding effective unconventional approaches to mass EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching for non- linguistic university students, to increase their motivation, interest in learning English, and their willingness to use this foreign language actively by lowering communication barriers.
In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of an experimental EFL teaching and learning framework, aimed at helping non-linguistic majors students to develop an English communication competence through an artificial bilingual environment. Statistical analysis and comparison of the results of the students’ surveys suggest that using more unconventional activities and a strong focus on students’ social interactions, interdisciplinary language activities and heterogeneity of study groups, builds students’ intrinsic motivation, removes communication barriers and increases the need to use English in real life.