Psychological Basis of Competence-Based Approach as a New Paradigm of Modern School Education

The article is devoted to the urgent problem of the modern school: its new competence paradigm. Competence of students is defined as a characteristic of their individual psychological resources, including the knowledge system organized in a specific way and their intellectual potential. It is emphasized that for a successful implementation of the competency approach it is necessary to develop scientifically sound and structurally ordered substantive content within the school education that together with the knowledge assimilation would provide for development of the intellectual capacities of students - the “up-to-bottom” path, as well as to conduct special work on focused development of cognitive processes, forming the structure of human intellect on the basis of cognitive synthesis - the “bottom-up” path.