FUTURE SOCIAL CARE TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL FOCUS MATURITY

The paper aims to reveal the level of future social care teachers' professional focus maturity in terms of studying at higher educational institutions. The experiment involved 393 students of 1st-4th years of study majoring in “Social education” of Chernihiv National T. G. Shevchenko Pedagogical University (Chernihiv), The National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv), Mykolayiv National University named after V. Sukhomlynskyi (My- kolaiv). The assessment of future social care teachers' professional focus was carried out by means of the method of expert evaluation. Besides, the method of the integral score calculation was also applied. The results were processed by means of the computer program “Statistics in education”. The analysis of the research results has shown that the level of professional focus maturity of future social care teachers develops in the process of studying at a university. It can be explained by the fact that positive dynamics of students' professional focus maturity is influenced by the gradual in- crease of the number of disciplines of professional sphere and internship (practice) according to the year of study. The research results have shown that the level of the future social care teachers' professional focus maturity does not meet modern requirements which means that the process of its formation at higher educational institutions is carried out improperly. That is why it is necessary to develop a technique for the formation of future social care teachers' profes- sional focus, which is planned to be performed in our further research works.