Communicative Tolerance of Postgraduate Students at an Engineering University

Abstract

The paper is devoted to analyzing the results of the research on communicative tolerance as a component of the professional pedagogical competence of postgraduate students at an engineering university. Importance of the research is determined by toughening requirements for engineering teaching staff in the area of business and interpersonal communication. Today’s engineering and educational processes are based on the principles of dialogicity, openness, interactivity and internationality. Determination of the educational progress and the development level of postgraduate students’ abilities for tolerant perception of social, cross-cultural, denominational and other differences will enable us to prepare them for effective interpersonal communication in the professional and pedagogical spheres; this will contribute to their successful communicative behavior. The paper presents the theoretical analysis results of modern approaches to research and development of communicative tolerance; it provides data from the empirical studies that contribute to identifying the specifics of communicative tolerance of postgraduate students at an engineering university. The authors have revealed the correlations between the communicative tolerance components and empathic abilities, social communicative competence, and dominant interpersonal communication types of the respondents. It has been found out that structure indicators of communicative tolerance are obviously different in male and female postgraduate students at an engineering university. Based on the obtained results, the authors have developed methodological guidance on teaching such subjects as “Higher education pedagogies”, “Methodology for teaching special subjects” to postgraduate students at an engineering university.