Inna Al. Polyakova

In the context of increasingly complex legal regulation, expanding the interpretative space of law enforcement, and strengthening the competency-based focus of higher legal education, developing legal argumentation in law students is becoming a significant theoretical and didactic task. Insufficient development of an argumentative culture manifests itself in a weak connection between norms and facts, the substitution of justification for the reproduction of normative material, difficulties in counter argumentation, interpretative instability, and insufficient readiness for publicly presenting a legal position. The aim of this article is to theoretically substantiate approaches to developing legal argumentation in law students and identify their didactic potential for designing the educational process in higher legal schools. The research methodology is based on systemic, competency-based, hermeneutic, logical-argumentative, rhetorical-discursive, and professional activity-oriented approaches. Theoretical analysis, comparison, conceptual and categorical reconstruction, structural and functional generalization and pedagogical modeling were used. As a result, the conceptual status of legal argumentation as a meta-subject professional and legal ability of a student to construct, verify and present a substantiated legal position in the conditions of regulatory uncertainty, factual variability and communicative competition was clarified; the argumentation situation as a basic didactic unit of training was substantiated; normative-cognitive, interpretative, factual-analytical, logical-procedural, rhetorical-communicative, axiological and reflexive-evaluative components were identified; the levels of formation of legal argumentation and pedagogical conditions for the development of argumentative competence were determined. The theoretical significance of this article lies in its integration of logical-formal, hermeneutic, rhetorical-discursive, and competency-based approaches into a holistic model of legal argumentation. Its practical significance lies in the potential use of the proposed components, levels, criteria, and conditions in designing academic disciplines, legal cases, assessment tools, written assignments, academic debates, and methodological scenarios for the professional training of preservice lawyers.

This article presents an analytical review of Russian and international studies on the influence of the point-rating system on student motivation and academic performance in higher education. The aim is to systematize approaches to interpreting this influence and to identify the conditions under which a semester-based accumulative point-rating system supports regular learning behavior of undergraduate and specialist students or, conversely, reinforces external motivation and formal score-oriented behavior. The methodological basis includes comparative analysis of publications, conceptual reconstruction, and theoretical synthesis of studies on formative assessment, self-determination, academic emotions, engagement, and self-regulated learning. The review shows that the effect of the point-rating system on motivation and academic performance is indirect and depends on criteria transparency, feedback structure, student choice, the distribution of assessment events across the semester, and the connection between scores and perceived competence growth. The paper is explicitly positioned as an analytical review and provides a basis for further empirical studies of specific organizational models of point-rating assessment.