Relevance. The development of the students’ general study skills is in most cases based on their ability to work with a scientific text, and it needs special examination.

Objective. The goal is to study the strategies the fourth-year students of different departments use to single out the most important information. It is also necessary to explore the criteria which students use to distinguish between the essential and inessential information while reading an explanatory scientific text.

Methods. We have used the method created by Sidelnikova and Malskaya, which constitutes a specially constructed text of an explanatory type including some essential information (the description and explanation of facts) along with some trap sentences, in their formal structure similar to definitions (sentences containing dates, surnames and the statement of the significance of the problem). 1021 fourth-year students of Moscow State University and Moscow Pedagogical University (from the pedagogical, psychological, philological departments and the department of soil science) have taken part in the examination.

Results. Less than 6 % of the students single out the description of the facts and their explanation while reading an explanatory text, which means that they learn the material and control the efficiency of learning in accordance with metacognitive knowledge based on academic conception of the structure of scientific knowledge? More than 94 % choose both the description of the facts and their explanation and the trap sentences, considering the sentences in the form of definitions, historical facts and the statements of the significance of the problem to be essential information. There have been found some statistically significant differences in the choice of the students of different departments.

Conclusion. The results show that the fourth-year students who have taken part in the study do not have academic conception of the structure of scientific knowledge and effective strategies for its mastering.