In the modern world, the role of the museum is constantly being transformed and rethought (Dalle Nogare, Murzyn-Kupisz, 2021; Castillo et all, 2021). Nowadays the key trend in European countries is building interaction between the spheres of culture and education, especially Universities, to create a common space for the generation of meanings (Poce et all, 2022; Ippoliti, Casale, 2021).

Today there are a number of major EU projects, for example Mu.Sa (a EU-wide Network of museums and cultural organizations co-funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union) aim to validate non-formal professional education provided by museums and introduce new positions in European museums that would be responsible for providing a productive visitor experience (i.g. Interactive Experience Developer etc). Also the main theorists of museum studies underlined the importance of lucidity of expositions’s main ideas for potential museum visitor (Dolak, 2018). So a lot of European researches were devoted to the problem of visitor’s behavior and understanding.  Some of the researchers used mapping to see the key points of expositions by visitor’s eyes (Diamantopolou S., Insulander E., Lindstrand F, 2012). Alternative way was in using of special cameras to fix the most attractive elements (Lefebvre, M., Rueda, 2018). Museums seek to increase the reflection of visitors in various ways. An example of this can be found in a study where researchers sought to find out whether the accompanying comments to the exhibits can stimulate the visitor's reflection and initiate a dialogue between a person and a museum exhibition. Three UK museum exhibits featured various accompanying comments with provocative questions that visitors interacted with. Findings based on 464 conversations indicated that the leading question influenced visitors' positions (Hohenstein, Tran, 2007).

Museum expositions are more and more often based on a problematic debatable issue. In this context, museums can be used not only as study sites but also as a resource for the formation of critical thinking and the development of reflection skills which are extremely important in the field of professional education (Escribano-Miralles, 2021; Goodwin, Quinlan, 2021). For example the paper by A. Poce (Poce et al, 2022) aims to illustrate the learning results of a pilot experience focused on the development of critical thinking (CT) skills through work-based activities, as an example of continuous instructional improvement in higher education institution (HEI) contexts. Specifically, more than 100 university students of two master’s degree programs at University Roma Tre participated in two different online learning paths, carried out by the Centre for Museum Studies research group during the academic year 2020–2021, containing activities of analysis, interpretation, argumentation, and critical evaluation of work-based experiences in the educational fields. Results from the pilot experience show a statistically significant improvement in some CT indicators.

Thus, it can be noted that the exposition space becomes a territory for gaining new experience and reflection. Therefore, it can be used in professional education both to form and to evaluate the visitor's competencies. In this regard, the purpose of the study was to determine the effectiveness of visiting a museum exhibition to assess the University students’ reflective skills. To achieve this goal, an internship was implemented for master's degree students of the History Department of the Moscow City University, whose professional education requires sufficiently high competencies for a critical analysis of the exposition

The study was qualitative and involved 38 students of the Department of History of the Master's program, who visited more than 30 museums in Moscow. Some of the participants work at schools now and the most part will work as school teachers after the University. The students were given the task to identify and describe the interactive practices within expositions, which provoked person’s reflection about complex problems. Students were given an introductory briefing before visiting the museum in which they found out the features of various European, American and Russian museum practices of such kind. Each student had to submit a presentation with the results of the analysis and fill out a questionnaire, which helped, on the one hand, to describe museum practices, and on the other hand, to assess the reflective competencies of the student him/herself. Also, each student was asked questions assessing: a) the criticality of their attitude to the exposition; b) the way of formulating the actual problems that could be reflected basing on the exposition. Besides, students were asked to compose the interdisciplinary tasks for school students which could be resolved using the exposition materials.

The conclusions can be divided into three groups: 1. About characteristics of the museum practices provoking the reflection: a) interactive practices used in museum expositions can be divided into three large categories: informing, entertaining and actualizing reflection. The main characteristics of the last one are discribed in our study. b) The most of the interactive practices of organizing expositions in the studied museums in Moscow are aimed at informing or entertaining. The practices of actualization of reflection are presented only in fragments. 2. On the organization of the assessment of deficits of students' reflexive competence. The assessment of students' reflexive competence can be effectively carried out through the analysis of how the student is able to: a) distinguish the practices of actualization of reflection in general exposition; b) critically answer the question whether those interactive practices that are declared by the museum as working with reflection really do it; c) formulate a detailed answer to the questions about what complex problem related to modern reality requires reflection after visiting the exposition; d) formulate a task for schoolchildren in such a way that they are of a problem reflexive nature. 3. On the deficits of the reflexive competence of the sample students: a) the greatest difficulty for students is to distinguish interactive expositional practices that evoke an emotional response or aimed at informing from practices that actualize reflection. b) students confuse the concepts of "topic" and "problem". To the question about the problem, the key themes of the exposition are formulated. c) they cannot formulate why the exposition material is a resource for understanding the actual reality. d) the majority of the formulated interdisciplinary tasks for schoolchildren did not require interaction and were aimed at testing knowledge, but not the ability to comprehend the material of the exposition by students.

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