Stages of understanding educational material: the issues of contents

Introduction. The paper focuses on the problem of understanding educational material by students. The research aims to study the process of understanding educational material and identify the meaningful characteristics its stages. Materials and Methods. The study employs a set of theoretical approaches and empirical methods to establish psychological and educational foundations of understanding. The authors clarify levels of understanding as an educational concept within psychological, educational and didactic approaches. Results. The authors have identified and characterized three main approaches to the interpretation of understanding as an educational concept. They adopted the didactic aspect of understanding, interpreting it as a process and a result of disclosing basic ideas, the essence of concepts, facts, laws, and phenomena, and establishing links with personal experience and the inclusion of new content in personality's meaningful sphere. The following characteristics of understanding are presented: depth, completeness, clarity, and validity. These characteristics are considered as a basis for establishing levels of understanding. They include understanding as recognizing, understanding as hypothesis, and understanding as generalizing. Consequently, five stages of understanding have been characterized. The first stage actualizes personal experience and motivation. The second one deals with recognizing and reproduction of new information. The third stage focuses on genetic understanding. The fourth one represents structural understanding. Finally, the fifth is a stage of systemic understanding. Conclusions. Summarizing various scientific approaches to studying the process of understanding educational material, the authors have revealed the contents of its stages, described such its characteristics as depth, completeness, clarity and validity, allowing students to follow the process of understanding educational material with the help of such tools as tasks, tests, and concept cards.