Relevance. Knowledge of the spontaneous development of learning skills (LS) of University students is important and relevant, because the lack of LS adversely affects the success of independent learning, reducing the level of social and professional mobility of students and their competitiveness in the labor market.

Objective. Determining the dynamics and extent of spontaneous development of basic and additional LS students with an engineering profile in usual side developmental   nature of learning at the University, as well as of their relationship with academic performance.

Methods. For the diagnosis of basic LS specially designed tasks to build knowledge on the material of technical disciplines were used. Additional LS were tested using the author's questionnaire with scaling.  

Sample. 135 students of the 1st, 4th and 6th courses of technical universities of Moscow: 89 boys and 46 girls aged 18 to 33 years.

Results.  During the full 6-year course of study, students of engineering profile showed an increase in the level of basic LS: non-independent knowledge building (+31.25%), independent knowledge building (+12%), mixed knowledge building (+81.96%). The growth of additional skills as conscious work with the cognitive sphere (+2.8%) and with emotional states (+13.33%) was established, but the ability to work with motives and volitional regulation decreased (-8.18%),  as well as to work with knowledge as learning objectives (-16.12%), and to plan the order and time of activities (-10.21%).

Conclusion. It is necessary to take into account the reduced opportunities of students in decoding and generalization in the process of obtaining knowledge from messages with their ambiguity and a large amount of specific content. These types of basic LS need to be purposefully developed. The negative dynamics in the development of a number of additional LS also indicates the need for their special development at the University.

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.