Possibilities to control students’ knowledge while trained for their future occupation in field of agricultural engineering

The contemporary labour market requires from the future agricultural engineers not only in-depth theoretical knowledge, but also an ability to apply it independently in non-standard production situations. The article deals with problems how to clarify the level of the students' readiness for production activities in the agro-engineering sphere. It has been established that in the training process of engineers, an urgent task is brought to the forefront -to provide conditions that ensure efficient professional self-development of the creative potential of a student's personality; to achieve a high level of development and training of the future professionals, including, perhaps, through new, reassessed approaches to the content and organisation of the students' knowledge control process. The paper substantiates a presumption that the principal task of all kinds of the students' knowledge control is to verify the fulfilment of the ultimate goal of professional training -the formation of a multicomponent structure of technical thinking, as well as engineering and educational-cognitive skills, that is, checking whether the students' technical thinking has reached the structure to be formed the level of readiness for the future engineering occupation in the selected speciality. Implementation of the developing function of the knowledge control can be efficiently carried out by involving students in productive search activities, aimed at solving real engineering problems and problem situations. The results of comparative studies allowed drawing a conclusion about significant advantages of the indicators of the students from the experimental groups over the reference ones. So, 29 % of students in the experimental groups demonstrated a creative level of educational and cognitive activity, while in the reference groups there were 22 % of such students.