RECOGNITION OF INDICATORS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COGNITIVE DIMENSIONS IN TERTIARY EDUCATION

The aim of the research was to find out what factors influence the development of cognitive dimensions in college students. The following factors were considered: field of study, academic achievement in a selected economic subject and abstract visual intellectual level. The reason for doing this research was to increase the quality of teaching economic subjects across bachelor study fields in the conditions of a practically oriented College of Polytechnics, Jihlava in the Czech Republic. Two fields of study were selected - the economic field - Finance and Management (N = 52 students) and the technical field - Applied Computer Science (N = 30 students). Study plans of both fields included the subject Corporate Economy in the first term of studies. Methodological research was based on the theory of problem-based learning. It was built on a test method that was used to gain data to identify the context of variables with the development of cognitive dimensions in the context of an internationally recognized framework for evaluating the success - the Bloom's Taxonomy. Two tests were used to collect the data: (a) a test measuring the abstract visual intellectual level; (b) a non-standardized test to measure students' achievement in the six cognitive dimensions of the Bloom's Taxonomy. The initial knowledge of students was comparable. The data were analyzed by factor analysis, followed by the Spearman and Pearson correlation coefficients. Cognitive dimensions could be grouped into two factors. Factor 1 - Application-Evaluation Dimension that was explained by the dimensions of Knowledge, Application, Evaluation; Factor 2 - Analytical Dimension that was explained by the dimensions of Comprehension, Analysis, Synthesis. The results showed that an individual did not have to be competent in the whole complexity of the Bloom's Taxonomy. The development of cognitive dimensions correlated with the field of study, the economic field was correlated with factor 2 and the technical field with factor 1. The development of cognitive dimensions did not correlate with the abstract-visual intellectual level. Factor 2 weakly negatively correlated with academic achievement in the subject Corporate Economy. This means that students who were successful in developing lower-order cognitive dimensions had a weak analytical orientation in the economic area, and vice versa. The results brought by the research will help improve teaching of economic subjects across the two disciplines, especially with regard to the innovation of learning and teaching strategies with a positive impact on the desired cognitive development of students.