Abstract:

The relevance of the article is due to the need to involve educational autonomy in the project activities of students. The purpose of the article is to study the criteria for the development of educational autonomy, such as independence and attention. The authors give a new definition of learning autonomy, which is understood as the student's ability to keep attention on the program of the planned activity, including conscious activity in the process of its implementation, in order to obtain the desired result.

The hypothesis of the research was the following:
1. The formation of educational independence among students is associated with self-organization and planning of their own individual activities, which is manifested in the dynamics of indicators of educational independence in the course of training.
2. Individual variations in the indicators dynamics of educational independence are associated with different levels of planning of educational activities among students of pedagogical profiles. Both of them were proved during the experiment.

The potential of retaining attention on the performing activity of a student in project activities has been revealed in the research. The level manifestations of the research skills of students in the experimental and control groups, in project activities are described. The essence of project activity in the development of educational autonomy through the solution of project tasks is shown. It has been also proved that subjects with "autonomous" and "mixed" types of personal-subjective self-regulation are able to freely put forward hypotheses and can conduct an independent analysis and solve a problem, but due to their unpreparedness for the analysis of new information, they cannot keep their attention on the object under study for a long time and highlight essential details.

It was revealed also that students of the "dependent" type, who made mistakes in the task, cannot correct the result and determine the program of further actions to complete new tasks. It is determined that the development of attention, as a component of educational autonomy, contributes to the replenishment and restoration of the resource of cognition. Thus, the common elements of all levels of development of independence are reflective assessment and control, self-organization in learning, including goal-setting in learning activities, as well as planning one's own individual learning activities.

This means that teachers can purposefully and systematically influence individual elements of autonomy (for example, goal setting, control or planning), and then autonomy becomes a manageable resource for the development and learning of students. These are the main educational benefit of the research made.

The study was carried out within the existential-integrative approach. Methods of diagnostic psychology and methods of classical pedagogy are used, such as:
- a questionnaire by G.S. Prygin "Autonomy" and "Dependence",
- a questionnaire of self-organization of activity by E.Yu. Mandrikova,
- a questionnaire for independence, organization, planning in the educational activities of students (authors').
The sample of the study are students of pedagogical profiles of 1st, 2d and 4th university courses.

The article is intended for psychologists, teachers, graduate students and researchers in the field of psychology and pedagogy.

Keywords:

Project activity, learning autonomy, self-regulation, attention retention potential, cognition.