The concept of "learning activity" is rather ambiguous. In the broad sense of the word, it is sometimes incorrectly considered as a synonym for learning, teaching and even learning. In a narrow sense, according to D.B. Elkonin, is the leading type of activity in the younger school age. In the works of D.B. Elkonina, V.V. Davydova, A.K. Markova, the concept of “learning activity” is filled with the actual activity content and meaning, correlating with a special “responsible attitude”, according to S.L. Rubinstein, the subject to the subject of learning throughout its entire length.

It should be noted that in this interpretation, “learning activity” is understood more broadly than the leading type (kind) of activity, since it applies to all ages, in particular to students. Educational activity in this sense is the activity of the subject in mastering generalized methods of educational actions and self-development in the process of solving educational problems specially set by the teacher, on the basis of external control and evaluation, turning into self-control and self-esteem. According to D.B. Elkonin, “learning activity is an activity that has as its content the mastery of generalized methods of action in the field of scientific concepts, ... such activity should be stimulated by adequate motives. They can be ... motives for acquiring generalized methods of action, or, more simply, motives for one's own growth, one's own improvement. If it is possible to form such motives among students, then by this they are supported, filled with new content, those general motives of activity that are associated with the position of the student, with the implementation of socially significant and socially valued activities..

Learning activity can accordingly be considered as a specific type of activity. It is aimed at the student himself as its subject - improvement, development, formation of him as a person due to the conscious, purposeful appropriation of sociocultural experience in various types and forms of socially useful, cognitive, theoretical and practical activities. The activity of the student is aimed at mastering deep systemic knowledge, working out generalized methods of action and their adequate and creative application in various situations.

The main characteristics of educational activities

There are three main characteristics of educational activity that distinguish it from other forms of learning: 1) it is specifically aimed at mastering educational material and solving learning problems; 2) general methods of action and scientific concepts are mastered in it (in comparison with everyday ones learned before school); 3) general methods of action precede the solution of problems (I.I. Ilyasov) (compare with learning by trial and error, when there is no preliminary general method, program of action, when learning is not activity). Let us add two more essential characteristics of educational activity to these three. Firstly, in response to a cognitive, insatiable need, 4) educational activity leads to changes in the subject himself, which, according to D.B. Elkonin, is its main characteristic. Secondly, the Czech theorist of the process and structure of learning I. Lingart considers another feature of learning activity as an active form of learning, namely 5) changes in the mental properties and behavior of the student "depending on the results of their own actions." Thus, we can talk about five characteristics of learning activity in comparison with learning.

Based on the definition of educational activity as an activity for mastering generalized methods of action, self-development of the student through the solution of educational tasks specially set by the teacher through educational actions, let us consider its actual activity characteristics. First of all, we emphasize that, following D.B. Elkonin, its social character: according to content, since it is aimed at assimilating all the riches of culture and science accumulated by mankind; in meaning because it is socially significant and socially valued; in shape, since it corresponds to socially developed standards of education and takes place in special public institutions, for example, in schools, gymnasiums, colleges, and institutes. Like any other, learning activity is characterized by subjectivity, activity, objectivity, purposefulness, awareness has a certain structure and content.

Learning activities- one of the main (along with work and play) types of human activity, specifically aimed at mastering the methods of objective and cognitive actions, generalized theoretical knowledge. Assimilation (learning) is an essential characteristic of U. D., nevertheless, these are different phenomena: assimilation is a process that takes place in any activity, U. D. is a type of activity, a special form of social activity of the individual.

W. d. performs a dual social function. Being a form of activity of the individual, it is a condition and means of his mental development, providing him with the assimilation of theoretical knowledge and thereby the development of those specific abilities that are crystallized in this knowledge. At a certain stage of mental development (at the early school age) U. d. plays a leading role in the formation of personality. As a form of socially normalized cooperation between a child and adults, educational activity is one of the main means of including the younger generations in the system of social relations, in openly collective activity, during which the values ​​and norms underlying any collective activity are assimilated.

Like the game, W. activity is a derivative type of activity that has historically separated from labor. Its selection is due to the emergence of theoretical knowledge, the content of which is only partially manifested in individual practical actions and, therefore, cannot be fully assimilated in the process of mastering these actions. The development of human knowledge (from the empirical level to the theoretical one) necessarily causes the development, restructuring of economic activity. The real scale of this restructuring is determined by the socioeconomic conditions of society, its need to equip the rising generations with knowledge of the theoretical and empirical level. In the most developed forms, U. D. appears for the first time in the era of the scientific and technological revolution.

The essence of teaching methods lies in solving educational problems, the main difference of which is that their goal and result is to change the acting subject itself, which consists in mastering certain modes of action, and not in changing the objects with which the subject acts. The solution of a separate educational task determines the integral act of the educational activity, that is, its simplest "unit", within which the structure of this type of activity as a whole is manifested. The implementation of such an act involves the actualization of the specific motive of U. d. - the definition of the final educational goal - the preliminary determination of the system of intermediate goals and ways to achieve them - the implementation of the system of actual educational actions - the implementation of control actions - the evaluation of the results of U. d.

Like any other human activity, U. D. is polymotivated. A special place in the system of motives of U. D. belongs to cognitive interest, which is directly related to its content and represents a specific, internal motive of U. D., without which the assimilation of knowledge from the ultimate goal ("motive-goal") can turn into a condition for achieving others. goals, i.e., the activity of the subject does not acquire an educational character (or loses it). The possibilities and conditions for the actualization of cognitive interest in cognitive activity are determined by its focus (on the results or methods of cognition) and the level of development (whether it is situational or stable, personal).

On the basis of the actualized motive of U. d., its final and intermediate goals are determined. Although goal-setting in U.D. most often appears as the “acceptance” by the subject of goals set from outside, it is not a one-time act, but a process of understanding the objective content of the goals set, their correlation with actual motives, “additional definition”. The complexity of this process is well evidenced known facts"redefining" learning goals. Simultaneously with the definition of goals, a preliminary analysis of the conditions and ways to achieve them is carried out, as a result of which a scheme of the act is formed that guides the subject in the process of its implementation. The implementation of the goals of educational learning is ensured by a system of educational activities, the composition and structure of which can vary significantly depending on the object of assimilation (theoretical or empirical knowledge), the method of its presentation, the required level of assimilation, etc.

The described structure is characteristic of the developed forms of U. d., which are the result of its formation in the conditions of schooling. The process of U.'s formation has not been studied enough. On the basis of experimental data, three main stages can be distinguished in it. The first of them is characterized by the development of individual educational actions; on this basis, a situational interest arises in the methods of action and mechanisms for "accepting" private educational goals are formed; control and evaluation. At the second stage, learning actions are combined into integral acts of activity subordinated to the achievement of a more distant ultimate goal; as such acts are formed, cognitive interest acquires a stable character, starting to perform the function of a meaning-forming motive of U. d. the acceptance of the final goal set from the outside, but also its independent concretization - on this basis, the actions of control and evaluation are intensively formed. The third stage is characterized by the unification of individual acts of educational activity into integral systems; cognitive interest is characterized by generalization, stability and selectivity, beginning to increasingly fulfill the function of an incentive motive for activity; in the system of educational actions, one of the central places is occupied by actions with various sources educational information(textbook, reference book, map, etc.). The chronological framework of these stages is relative and is determined primarily by the conditions of learning. Under unfavorable conditions, the development of U. d. can stop at the first stage; under optimal conditions, as experimental data show, already at the 6-7th year of study, U. d. enters the highest stage of its formation.

V.V. Davydov

Definitions, meanings of the word in other dictionaries:

Psychological Dictionary

The leading activity is of primary school age, within the framework of which there is a controlled appropriation of the foundations of social experience, primarily in the form of basic intellectual operations - and theoretical concepts -.

The concept of "learning activity" is rather ambiguous. With its broad interpretation, this term replaces the concepts of learning and teaching. According to the periodization of the age development of D. B. Elkonin, educational activity is the leading one in primary school age. However, it continues to be one of the main types of activity in subsequent age periods - adolescence, senior school and student. In this sense, educational activity can be defined as the subject's activity in mastering generalized methods of solving life problems and self-development, carried out by solving educational problems specially set by the teacher. Initially, learning activities are carried out on the basis of external control and evaluation by the teacher, but gradually they turn into self-control and self-esteem of the student.

Educational activity, like any other, is motivated, purposeful, objective, has its own means of implementation, its own specific product and result. Among all other types of activity, educational activity is distinguished by the fact that its subject and subject coincide: it is aimed at the student himself - his improvement, development, formation as a person due to his conscious, purposeful development of social experience. The activity of the student is focused on the development of deep systemic knowledge, the development of generalized methods of action and the ability to adequately and creatively apply them in a variety of situations.

There are three main characteristics of educational activity that distinguish it from other forms of human activity: 1) it is specifically aimed at mastering educational material and solving educational problems; 2) generalized methods of action and scientific concepts are mastered in it (in contrast to everyday concepts, which are assimilated outside of activities specially aimed at this); 3) the development of the general method of action is ahead of the practical solution of problems in time.

In addition, learning activity differs from other types of human activity in that in it the subject consciously pursues the goal of achieving changes in himself, and the Czech theoretician of learning I. Lingart singles out as its main distinguishing feature the dependence of changes in the mental properties and behavior of the student on the result of his own actions.

The actual activity characteristics of educational activity include its subject, means and methods of implementation, product and result. Subject learning activity, that is, what it is aimed at, is primarily the assimilation of knowledge, mastery of generalized methods of action, the development of techniques and methods of action, their programs and algorithms, in the process of which the student himself develops. According to D. B. Elkonin, learning activity is not identical with assimilation. Assimilation is its main content and is determined by the structure and level of its development. At the same time, assimilation mediates changes in the intellectual and personal development of the subject.

Funds educational activities, with the help of which it is carried out, are represented by three types: 1) mental logical operations that provide cognitive and research activity - comparison, classification, analysis, synthesis, generalization, abstraction, induction, deduction. Without them, no mental activity is possible at all; 2) sign systems, in the form of which knowledge is fixed and individual experience is reproduced. These include language, alphabet, number system used in various spheres of life and scientific disciplines symbolism; 3) the so-called background, i.e. the knowledge already available to the student, through the inclusion of new knowledge in which the individual experience of the student is structured.

Ways educational activities can be diverse, including reproductive, problem-creative, research and cognitive actions, but they all fall into two categories: mental actions and motor skills. The most complete and detailed description of the method is presented by the theory of the phased formation of mental actions (P. Ya. Galperin, N. F. Talyzina). According to this theory, the objective action and the thought that expresses it constitute final, initially different, but genetically related links in a single process of gradual transformation of a material action into an ideal one, its internalization, i.e., the transition from outside to inside. The action is functionally connected with the object to which it is directed, includes the purpose of transforming the given object and the means of such transformation. All this taken together constitutes the performing part of the action being formed.

In addition to the performing part, the action includes the orienting basis of the action (OOD). A correct DTE provides the subject with a correct picture of the circumstances in which an action should be performed, drawing up an action plan adequate to these circumstances, using the necessary forms of action control and applying appropriate methods for correcting errors. Thus, the level and quality of the performance of the formed action depend on the OOD. The orienting operations that are part of the OOD can be active when the action is at the stage of initial orientation in it and is being built in its entirety, and passive when it is the turn to perform an already established, formed action. OOD is a psychological mechanism for regulating performing and control operations that are included in the action in the process of its formation and with the help of which the correctness of the process of developing the action is assessed.

The formation of OOD is determined according to three criteria: the degree of its completeness (complete - incomplete), the degree of generalization (generalized - specific) and the way students receive it (independently - in finished form). Complete OOD assumes that the student has accurate and sufficient information about all the components of the action being formed. Generalization of OOD is characterized by the breadth of the class of objects to which this action is applicable in practice. Self-development of OOD gives the student the most accurate orientation in the performance of an action that quickly passes to the level of automatism. The combination of each of the three components determines the type of DTE.

Theoretically, there can be eight types of DTEs, but in reality, three types are most common. In accordance with them, three types of teaching are distinguished. First type is present when performing an action according to the trial and error method, when the task of learning a certain action is not specifically set. At the same time, the assimilation of the action occurs with errors, insufficient understanding of the material, inability to highlight the most significant features and issues. Second type involves setting the task special education action and a reasonable study of its external aspects before the start of practical implementation. Here the type of OOD is set by the teacher, while the student himself is not able to orient himself in the newly performed action. Assimilation of knowledge in this case occurs more confidently, with a full understanding of the content of the material and a clear distinction between essential and non-essential features. Third type It is characterized by the fact that the student, having met with a new action for him, is able to compose and implement its orienting basis himself. With this type of teaching, a quick, effective and error-free assimilation of an action is ensured, which involves the formation of all its basic qualities.

According to the theory of P. Ya. Galperin, the process of mastering knowledge and forming actions goes through six stages: 1) motivation (attracting the attention of the student, awakening his interest and desire to acquire relevant knowledge); 2) understanding of the OOD; 3) performance of an action in a material (materialized) form; 4) performing an action in terms of loud speech; 5) performing an action in terms of speech to oneself; 6) performance of an action in terms of inner speech (in the mind). The orienting basis of a given mental action is explained to the student at the very beginning of its formation, then the action itself is performed based on the OOD, and first in the external plan with real objects. After reaching a certain level of mastery in the external performance of an action, the student begins to perform it by speaking aloud, then by speaking to himself, and ultimately completely in his mind. This is mental action in the proper sense of the word.

Along with mental actions, students develop perception, voluntary attention and speech, as well as a system of concepts related to the action being performed. The action as a result of its formation on the basis of this theory can be transferred to the mental plane either in its entirety, or only in its indicative part (understanding of the action). In the latter case, the performing part of the action remains external, changes along with the internal OOD, and turns into a motor skill that accompanies the mental action.

Skill in psychology it is defined in different ways, but the main essence of all its definitions is that it represents a performance of an action strengthened and brought to perfection as a result of repeated purposeful exercises. The skill is characterized by the absence of directional control from the side of consciousness, optimal execution time, quality. It is a multi-level motor system: it always has a leading and background levels, leading auxiliary links, automatisms of different ranks. The process of skill formation is no less complicated.

N. A. Bernshtein distinguishes two periods in the construction of any skill.

First period - skill establishment- includes four phases:

1) establishment of the leading sensorimotor level;

2) determining the composition of movements by observing and analyzing the movements of another person;

3) identification of adequate corrections as “self-perception of these movements from within”;

4) switching background corrections to lower levels, i.e., the process of automation.

Second period - skill stabilization- also breaks down into phases:

1) triggering different levels together;

2) standardization of movements;

3) stabilization, providing resistance to various interferences, "unbreakability".

Almost the same periods of skill formation are established by L. B. Itelson, considering the actual psychological side of its formation (Table 1).

Table 1

This table shows that as the skill is formed, the number of errors made when performing an action decreases, the speed of performing individual operations increases, and their stable sequence is established; the subject's attention is transferred from the process of performing an action to its result, consciousness loses its focus on the form of performing the action, the degree of physical and emotional stress and fatigue decreases, and the actions themselves are gradually reduced due to the loss of some intermediate operations.

Product learning activity is the structured and updated knowledge that has appeared in the student, which becomes the basis for the ability to solve problems that require its application. Result educational activity is not knowledge itself, but a change in the level of development of the student caused by its assimilation: the emergence of new life values, life meanings, a change in attitude to learning. The subject may be tempted to continue this activity or may begin to avoid it. These variants of attitude to learning ultimately determine the level of intellectual and personal development.

Along with the concept of "learning activity" in pedagogy and psychology, the terms "training", "teaching" and "learning" are widely used. These concepts are often confused, replacing one with another, although their content is different. Under learning(the word itself comes from the verb "teach", that is, teach someone else) is understood as the active activity of the teacher in transferring knowledge, skills, abilities and life experience to students. When using the word " doctrine» refers to the student's own activity and efforts to develop their abilities and acquire knowledge, skills and abilities. Both learning and learning are processes that unfold over time. To denote the result of these processes, the term " learning”, which comes from the perfective verb “to learn”. This concept characterizes the fact that the subject acquires new mental properties and qualities as a result of learning, teaching and other types of activity. It should be noted that both training, and teaching, and educational activities in general, in some cases, may not have a visible result, acting in the form of learning. Learning differs from learning also in that it is usually an organized and consciously controlled process, while learning can occur spontaneously and be the result of any activity, not just learning. Teaching and learning are almost always conscious processes, and learning can also occur unconsciously: a person may not be aware for some time that he has learned something, although this actually happened. These are the main reasons for breeding the discussed concepts and their parallel use.

3.2. Types of learning, their development in ontogenesis. Psychological factors of learning success

The process of development of the organism and the psyche is not in all cases associated with learning: for example, it does not include the processes and results that characterize the biological maturation of the organism, unfold and proceed according to biological, including genetic, laws. Nevertheless, learning directly depends on maturation, always relies on a certain level of biological maturity of the organism and cannot be realized without it. For example, a child is not able to speak on his own until he develops phonemic hearing, the vocal apparatus and the parts of the brain responsible for speech. Children under the age of 14 are not allowed to engage in sports such as boxing and weightlifting, that is, until the age until their skeleton is completely ossified and there is sufficient muscle mass. P. Teilhard de Chardin noted that "... without a long period of maturation, no profound change in nature can occur."

Man has five kinds of learning. Three of them are also characteristic of animals and unite man with all other living beings with a developed central nervous system.

1. Learning by mechanism imprinting. The word "imprinting" in translation from English literally means "imprinting". Both in humans and animals, this mechanism is leading in the first time after birth and is a rapid automatic adaptation of the body to living conditions using innate forms of behavior - unconditioned reflexes. Through imprinting, instincts are formed that are genetically programmed and hardly amenable to change. The mechanism of imprinting is better understood in higher animals. The famous Swiss ethologist K. Lorenz studied it on the example of ducklings that had just hatched from eggs, which have an innate unconditioned reflex following the first moving object in their field of vision. Under normal conditions, the mother duck becomes such an object, and the following of the chicks ensures their safety and further learning. In the last minutes before the ducklings were born, K. Lorenz isolated the mother duck from the eggs and himself turned out to be the first moving object they saw, which they began to follow. Young mammals imprint the appearance of their fellows and are guided by it in the search for breeding partners. In humans, the mechanism of imprinting is leading only in the first hours and days of life, when other types of learning have not yet begun to form. For example, as soon as a newborn touches his mother's breast with his lips for the first time, an inborn sucking reflex immediately works in him, and in the future this whole situation as a whole - a certain position during feeding, the smell of the mother, touching the nipple with his lips - causes this reflex in the child, providing him with nutrition. . Thus, elementary learning is necessary even to turn on genetically programmed instincts.

2. Conditioned reflex learning. The name of this type of learning speaks for itself: within its framework, life experience is acquired through the formation of conditioned reflexes. The beginning of his research was laid by the works of the outstanding Russian physiologist I.P. Pavlov. As a result of the formation of a conditioned reflex, the body develops a reaction to a biologically indifferent stimulus that did not cause such a reaction before. Classical examples of the formation of conditioned reflexes in the studies of I.P. Pavlov: when feeding a laboratory dog, a light bulb was lit next to the bowl, and after a while, unconditioned food reflexes in this dog began to appear only at the sight of a lit light bulb, even in the absence of food. Also, on the basis of food reflexes, a conditioned reflex was developed in laboratory mice: they were fed accompanied by the ringing of a bell, and after several such situations, they began to run only to the ringing of this bell, without even having received food.

Conditioned reflexes can be developed in a child during the first days of life. In one of the maternity hospitals in Moscow, an experiment was carried out, consisting in the fact that as soon as each child turned his head to the right, a light bulb was lit next to him. In the first days of life, children already have an orienting reflex "What is it?", which is expressed in turning the head towards a source of light or sound. By the end of the first day of the experiment, a significant increase in the children's head turns to the right side was recorded. Then the light bulb on the right side of each child was turned off, and the reflex quickly faded away. A day later, with the same children, the experiment was continued: light bulbs were turned on when they turned their heads to the left, and the conditioned reflex, expressed in an increase in turning their heads to the left, formed in them as quickly as in the first case. As a result of constant association in the memory of a stimulus with the satisfaction of a biological need, the body learns to respond to it, and the stimulus begins to perform a signaling function.

3. operant learning. In this case, individual experience is acquired by "trial and error". The task or situation faced by the individual gives rise to a variety of behavioral reactions in him, with the help of which he tries to solve this problem. Each of the solution options is consistently tested in practice and the result achieved is automatically evaluated. That reaction or combination of reactions that leads to the best result, providing the best adaptation to the situation, stands out from the rest and is fixed in the experience. Subsequently, when faced with a similar situation, this reaction will be used in the first place. The child begins to use learning by trial and error already in infancy, when he learns to manipulate objects. This type of learning is used by a person mainly in the field of practical actions: handling objects, physical exercises.

The other two types of learning available to man are ranked among the highest, since they are not found or almost never found in other living beings.

4. vicarnoe learning is carried out by direct observation of the behavior of other people, as a result of which a person immediately adopts and assimilates the observed forms of behavior. This type of learning is especially significant in infancy and early childhood, when, while not yet mastering the symbolic function of speech, the child gains experience mainly through imitation. To imitate the actions of adults, repeating them after them, the child begins already in infancy, and by the beginning of early childhood, delayed imitation occurs when the child depicts those actions that he observed some time ago. In the third year of life, sexual self-identification begins to be realized through imitation: the child imitates more the parent of the same gender.

5. Verbal learning gives a person the opportunity to acquire new experience through language and verbal communication. Thanks to him, a person can transfer to other people who speak speech and receive from them the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities. To do this, they must be expressed in words understandable to the student, and the meaning of incomprehensible words needs to be clarified. Speaking more broadly, not only verbal speech, but also other sign systems, one of which is language, serve as a means of verbal learning. Sign systems also include symbols used in mathematics, physics, chemistry, graphic symbols used in technology, art and other fields of activity. The assimilation of language and other symbolic systems, the acquisition of the ability to operate with them, frees a person from the need for a real collision with the object of study and its knowledge with the help of the senses. Learning becomes possible in an abstract, abstract form on the basis of higher mental functions- consciousness, thinking and speech. Verbal learning in its simplest forms becomes possible for a child from the moment when he begins to demonstrate an understanding of what the adults around him are saying, that is, even before reaching the age of one. But the full possibilities of verbal learning begin to be used by the child only when he speaks himself and demonstrates the desire to find out the meaning of words incomprehensible to him.

The learning process is implemented through the following intellectual mechanisms: association formation (establishing links between individual knowledge or parts of experience), imitation (mainly in the field of skills formation), distinction and generalization (in the field of concept formation), insight (“guesses”, i.e., the direct perception of any new information in what is already known from past experience), creativity (the basis for creating new knowledge, objects, skills and abilities).

The success of learning depends on many factors, including psychological ones. These factors fall into three areas: the student, the teacher, and the learning material. Of the psychological factors that determine the success of learning, to student include: his motivation for learning, the arbitrariness of cognitive processes, the development of volitional qualities of the individual (persistence, determination, responsibility, discipline, consciousness, accuracy), etc. An important role is played by the development of communicative qualities and skills of the student: the ability to interact with people, especially with teachers and comrades in the study group, the ability to ask for help if necessary and to help others in case of difficulties.

teachers include such circumstances that determine the success of learning as the presence of the psychological qualities necessary for the implementation of pedagogical activity: enthusiasm for the subject being taught, the ability to convey this enthusiasm to students, the use of teaching methods appropriate for the age and intellectual development of students, as well as other professionally important qualities (for more details, see below). 5.1, 5.2). One of the most important factors in the success of learning related to the teacher is the system of rewards used by him for success in learning activities and punishments for failures in it. Incentives should correspond to the real success of the student and reflect the efforts made by him as much as possible. Encouragement should be more tangible for those academic successes, the achievement of which was difficult and depended more on the student's efforts than on his abilities. Punishments should play a stimulating role, affect and actualize the student's need for self-improvement, strengthen his motivation to achieve success, and not avoid failure (for more details, see 6.4).

Finally, educational material is also a source of important factors for learning success. The main ones are the content of the material, the simultaneous combination of its accessibility to the understanding of the student and a sufficient level of complexity. Accessibility ensures the most complete assimilation of the material by students, and complexity ensures their further mental development. Accessibility and complexity must be reasonably combined: too simple material will not have any noticeable effect on mental development, and too complex material will not be understood and fully assimilated by students, they will not be able to use it in practice, and, as a result, it will also not leave a stable , a noticeable trace in their psyche. The optimal complexity from a psychological point of view is such educational material, which is at the highest level of difficulty currently available to the student for mastering. Studying on such material, the subject of educational activity not only experiences the greatest personal satisfaction from success, but also develops best intellectually. Another important point is the connection between the degree of difficulty of the material and the student's interest in it, the personal significance of this material for him. Material that is closely related to the needs of the student and his knowledge and skills, which he himself considers valuable, other things being equal, is perceived as less difficult. At the same time, extremely light material that does not require a certain degree of mental effort does not arouse interest. Overcoming difficulties in educational activities should regularly evoke a sense of success in the student, therefore, a positive attitude and interest in educational activities are formed in conditions of real overcoming of difficulties, which means that these difficulties themselves should be within the student's power.

3.3. Features of learning during preschool childhood

The acquisition of new experience by a person begins from the first days of his life, but in different age periods this process occurs in different ways. In developmental and educational psychology, the names of age periods according to the levels of education are accepted: junior preschool (3–5 years old), senior preschool (5–7 years old), junior school (7–10 years old), secondary school, or teenage (10–15 years old). ), senior school, or early youth (15-17 years old), and student, or youthful (17-22-23 years old). Each age is characterized by three main indicators: 1) a certain social situation of development, i.e., the form of relations that the child enters into with adults in a given period; 2) the leading type of activity; 3) basic mental neoplasms, that is, mental and social changes that first appear at a given age stage and determine the main lines of mental development during this period.

The period of preschool childhood is highlighted by us especially, since learning at this time is already in full swing, but educational activity has not yet been formed. This is the main qualitative difference between this period and the period of schooling.

From the first days of life, the child accumulates experience due to the action of the mechanisms of imprinting and conditioned reflex learning. With physical development, operant learning begins to play an increasingly important role, and through communication with adults, vicarious and verbal learning begins to develop. By the time a child reaches the age of 2, all five types of learning are already available to him and act together, which ensures rapid progress in his development, especially noticeable at an early age. Before a year and a half or two years, all types of learning in a child exist independently of each other and of speech, and speech is used only as a means of emotional communication.

The task of learning in infancy and early childhood is to combine different forms of learning, which is necessary because different types of learning involve and develop different analyzers, and the experience gained with the help of several senses at once is more versatile and rich. If all four types of learning are used in education, which are socially influenced (that is, everything except imprinting), then the child will simultaneously develop perception, motor skills, attention, memory, thinking and speech.

For physical development baby(from birth to 1 year old) requires systematic exercises, bright multi-colored toys, which he can manipulate in various ways: pick up, move, turn, produce visual and auditory effects. Through these activities, the infant actively learns the world. He begins to form voluntary movements and cognitive interests. In the second half of life, children begin to reproduce and repeat the movements of adults, thereby demonstrating their readiness for vicarious learning with repeated independent exercises. This is especially important for further speech development. The child begins to develop speech hearing, which includes phonemic hearing, morphemic hearing, learning the rules for combining sounds and words. For the development of speech hearing, one should talk with the baby as much as possible from the first days, and at the same time he should see the face and hands of the speaker well, since additional information is transmitted through facial expressions and gestures about what is indicated with the help of words. The success of assimilation and understanding of speech increases significantly if, along with proper verbal communication with an adult and during it, the child has the opportunity to actively manipulate objects called by an adult, independently explore them, study them carefully.

The main acquisition of the child by the end of infancy is bipedalism. It provides the release of the hands, which have the opportunity to perform even more diverse movements. For the development of the movements of the arms and legs of the child and his accelerated preparation for upright posture, coordination of hand and foot movements is of great importance. It is important that the child can simultaneously lean on objects with his feet and grab them with his hands, first lying down, and then sitting and moving along the surface. This will prepare the coordinated movements of his arms and legs and the corresponding muscle groups. In addition, in the second half of life, the perception, memory and motor activity of the child reach such a level that he is able to solve elementary tasks in a visual-active plan. The development of visual-effective thinking begins. You can speed it up by setting the baby tasks for visual and motor search for familiar and attractive objects.

AT early childhood(from 1 to 3 years) the child's intellect improves, visual-effective thinking develops and the transition from it to visual-figurative thinking begins. To speed up this process, children should be given as many tasks for imagination as possible, and their desire for creativity and activity should be encouraged. At this age, the child is most receptive to the assimilation of speech, as the formation of the prerequisites for mastering it is being completed - speech hearing and the ability to understand. Passive perception and response to adult speech are replaced by active mastery of speech. The development of a child's speech in the initial period of active use of it is based on operant and vicarious learning, outwardly expressed as imitation of the speech of adults. Therefore, it is necessary to speak with the child somewhat more slowly than usual, clearly pronouncing all the words and expressions, to use facial expressions and gestures more widely, since it is easier for the child to catch the meaning of the spoken words from them. In the process of speech development, the child imitates the members of his family most of all, therefore, the more often and more correctly they talk to him, the faster he learns speech. Parents sometimes begin to worry that their child speaks little for his age, but if he understands the words addressed to him well, there is no reason for concern. In the third year of life, children often demonstrate a significant increase in their own speech activity, catching up with their peers. There are significant individual differences in the nature and pace of the child's assimilation of active speech, which nevertheless remain the norm and should not cause concern.

Young children are characterized by increased curiosity, and its support by adults leads to the rapid intellectual development of the child, to the acquisition of the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities in the process of playing communication with the elders. Among the toys of the child, analogues of real objects should appear, with the help of which children, imitating adults, could join the world of human relations. There should be plenty of dolls depicting people and animals, cubes from which you can create various designs, household items, toy furniture, kitchen utensils, garden tools, tools. It is at this age that the child learns the generally accepted methods of acting with objects and the purpose of these objects, and also begins to master instrumental and correlative actions with the help of toys. In order to use one object as an instrument of influence on another, the child must learn to adapt the movements of his hand to the device of the instrument used. This process takes time, and learning here is mainly operant, but both vicarious, when an adult shows the child a way to hold a tool and actions with it, and verbal, when a direct display is replaced by a verbal explanation (but at an early age this does not happen so often) .

preschool age(from 3 to 7 years old) contributes a lot to cognitive development children, and how thoughtful their education and upbringing in the family during this period depends on the degree of their readiness for schooling. During this period, the child builds an adequate image of reality due to the assimilation of sensory standards, i.e., the properties of objects distinguished by perception and fixed in the language in the form of concepts (sizes, shapes, colors, temperature, textures, etc.). Such reference samples in the perception of the shape of objects can serve as geometric figures(triangle, circle, square, etc.), with the perception of size - gradations of measures (length, area, volume), with the perception of color - the natural spectrum and various shades of its primary colors. In parallel with the development of perception, the process of developing the child’s memory takes place in several directions at once: memorization becomes arbitrary and mediated, memorization and recall techniques are formed, repetition aloud is replaced by repetition to oneself. The limit of the development of the memory of a preschooler is set by his intellectual capabilities. The main feature of the development of thinking in preschool age is the transition from the external plan of action to the internal one. This is possible because speech begins to be included in the setting of the task by the preschooler, verbal reasoning is used. Visual-figurative thinking and creative imagination make it possible to draw up a plan for solving a problem and follow it.

The development of speech in preschool age follows the line of its connection with thinking. The main ways of developing the speech of preschoolers are the formation of concepts, the logic of reasoning, the semantic enrichment of the word, the differentiation and generalization of verbal meanings. The main task of adults during this period of speech development is to enrich the child's vocabulary, to assimilate the idea of ​​the ambiguity of the words used and their semantic shades. The child needs to develop the ability to tell and reason aloud, encouraging him to actively use speech. This is facilitated by intellectual word games, reading stories and fairy tales, tasks for inventing them. During these years, it is already possible to start learning a foreign language, as a preschooler acquires the ability to learn the general structure of the language and its laws.

It is advisable for preschoolers to begin teaching the perception and generation of written speech, that is, reading and writing. After the child learns the letters and learns to read by syllables, it is necessary to teach him how to properly stress. On this basis, there is further learning to read in whole words as a result of the formation of word reproduction with a focus on the stressed vowel sound. In fact, learning to read is divided into two stages, qualitatively different from each other. The first of them is analytical (the intellectual operation of analysis consists in the mental division of an object into its component parts), in which children master the reading of individual parts of words, the mechanism for reading syllables and combining them into words. The second stage is synthetic (the intellectual operation of synthesis is the opposite of analysis and consists in combining parts into a whole), which involves learning to read whole words, phrases and sentences, mastering intonations, and comprehending a coherent text. Although a child is now required to be able to read at least one syllable when entering school, in principle it is possible to ensure that by this moment the child already has the skills of synthetic reading. What is needed for this is described in section 3.4 when describing the preparation of the child for school.

A child can also be taught to write as early as 5 years of age, first in block letters, and then in ordinary written letters. At the same time, the main goal of teaching a preschooler to write is not his ability to write letters, but the development of written speech as a special form of expressing the need to speak out, the need for communication. But education at this age in any case should be based on the personal interest of the child, be attractive to him. The teaching and learning of preschool children should remain within the framework of their leading activity - the game. The educational material should be directly related to the needs of the preschooler, since he is not yet able to ask himself why he needs this material, and, accordingly, quickly forgets that in given time does not meet his needs and what he constantly does not use.

3.4. Psychological readiness of the child to study at school

The formation and improvement of the cognitive processes and personal qualities of the child in preschool childhood provide not only his development, but also preparation for learning at school.

The opinions of most researchers on the problem of children's readiness for schooling agree that it includes at least two components: information-cognitive and personal. Informational and educational The component is related to the fact that by the time the child enters school, he should already have a certain amount of knowledge and skills. The requirements for the knowledge and skills of a child entering school increase with each new generation of schoolchildren. Even 20 years ago, not all children entering school could read at least syllable by syllable. This was not specifically required, since in the first grade, training began with learning the alphabet from the primer, and the formation of reading skills was thus ensured for all students. Moreover, in scientific periodicals there were discussions on the topic of whether it is harmful to teach a child to read before school. Those who posed the question in this way gave two main arguments: firstly, a child who can read will not be interested in studying in the first grade, he will get bored in the classroom and begin to interfere with his comrades and the teacher, and secondly, parents who do not have special pedagogical knowledge may use "inappropriate" methods of teaching reading that come into conflict with the school methodology that the child will inevitably encounter, and the difference in methods will make it difficult for the teacher to work with such a child. Now this question has been removed by itself: the ability to read at least syllable by syllable is a mandatory requirement for admission to school. It has already been said above that, in principle, a preschooler can be taught to read not only by syllables, but also in a synthetic way, that is, together. To do this, in teaching reading, it is necessary to distinguish the following stages.

1. Development of attention to the grammatical features of words (prepositions, word endings, their order in a sentence) and clarification of their role in the connection of words in a sentence.

2. Learning to predict when reading, that is, the ability to guess about the possible semantic and verbal continuation of the text.

3. Learning to read words together, reducing unstressed vowels in them.

4. Teaching the selection and continuous reading of the so-called phonetic word (word with auxiliary words and particles adjacent to it).

5. Formation of the ability to combine words into phrases, read them without re-reading.

6. Teaching the actual reading of a sentence - reading with intonational division into semantic groups expressing a single semantic whole (such groups are called syntagmas).

In addition to the ability to read, a child entering school is required to know about the world around him, allowing him to navigate in Everyday life. RS Nemov proposes the following list of questions for assessing the general orientation and stock of everyday knowledge of children entering school.

1. What is your name? (Calling a surname instead of a given name is not a mistake.).

2. How old are you?

3. What are your parents' names? (Calling nicknames is not considered a mistake.).

4. What is the name of the city where you live?

5. What is the name of the street where you live?

6. What is your house and apartment number?

7. What animals do you know? Which are wild and which are domestic? (An answer that names at least two wild and two domestic animals is counted.).

8. At what time of the year do leaves appear and at what time of the year do leaves fall from trees?

9. What is the name of the time of day when you wake up, have dinner and get ready for bed?

10. Name the items of clothing and cutlery that you use. (An answer is counted in which at least three items of clothing and three cutlery are named.).

In addition to the information reflected in these questions, the future first grader should list the names of the days of the week and months of the year in order, be able to sort the proposed pictures into groups denoting abstract concepts (furniture, clothes, shoes, animals, birds, etc.).

The skills of a child entering school are tested using various methods. One of the most popular and widely used is the Kern-Jirasek test. It consists of three tasks. The first of them is to draw a person (male figure). Attention is drawn to whether all the details of the appearance are present, whether there are clothes, as drawn and connected to the body of the limb. The second task is to copy the phrase written in written letters. A child entering school does not yet know how to write in written letters, but the way he copies them reveals the features of fine motor skills, as well as the ability to follow the model and accept the learning task as a task that needs to be completed. The criteria for the severity of these properties in a child are the following signs: evenness of writing a phrase, emphasis capital letter, the absence of gaps in letters, the separation of words by spaces, the presence of a dot at the end. The third task is to draw a group of points located in a certain way. By the way this is done, one can judge the concentration and stability of attention.

In addition to the knowledge and skills actually available to the child, information and cognitive readiness also reflects the level of development of his cognitive processes. By entering school, a child needs to have voluntary attention, but in fact, as a rule, by this moment it exists only in its infancy: voluntary concentration tires the child very quickly, the stability of voluntary attention is still very low, so the teacher has to rely more on the involuntary attention of first graders . The memory of children entering school is already functioning well, they are able to remember a fairly large amount of information, but memorization itself occurs mainly mechanically. The development of thinking by the time of entering school should be at the level of free operation with images and the beginning of the formation of abstract concepts. Of course, visual-effective thinking should also be involved, an indicator of its development is the success of the child's practical actions with objects. Speech by this time should be used by the child not only for communication, but also for managing other cognitive processes: he must understand and accept verbal instructions calling for concentration, paying attention, remembering, imagining, thinking, and also learning to give himself such instructions himself.

The second component of school readiness is personal. Some authors unjustifiably narrow its semantic field, calling it motivational and thus excluding from consideration other personal qualities of the child necessary for learning at school. Motives and the motivational sphere play an important role among them. The child should strive to acquire new knowledge and develop new skills, achieve academic success and have a moderately high level of aspirations.

In addition, the claim to the new status of a schoolchild, a person engaged in a serious matter - study, exalts the child in his own eyes, because schoolchildren seem to him "big".

Motivation determines the performance of the student as the main prerequisite for all his achievements. But the motives of a child entering school are by no means always characterized by the required degree of maturity. For example, adults during this period of a child's life often ask him if he wants to go to school and what he likes there. The answers to this last question may be: "Briefcase", "Change", "You can play with the guys." Such motives indicate that the child does not yet fully understand the essence of the teaching and focuses mainly on the external attributes of the school. Of course, all children go through a passion and a period of pride in school paraphernalia and through its demonstration to all acquaintances, but those of them whose motives for teaching are distinguished by a high degree of maturity will quickly bypass this stage.

Some children, when asked if they want to go to school, answer in the negative. Most often this happens due to the fact that they are anxious about the difficulties that await them there. Usually such an attitude is transmitted to children from parents who overly express their concern about the future academic success and failure of their children. The behavior of older brothers and sisters who are already in school and experiencing certain difficulties can play a role. Watching this, the child himself may begin to be afraid of school.

In addition to motives, strong-willed qualities are also essential: patience, perseverance, purposefulness, discipline, accuracy, etc. Without these qualities, it is impossible to make educational success any sustainable. We must not lose sight of the development of communicative qualities - sociability, responsiveness, the ability to help others and ask for help yourself. The lag in the development of these qualities will make it difficult for the child to establish contact with comrades, especially if before school he had no such experience at all, for example, he did not attend kindergarten. In kindergarten, the child has time to get used to the situation when he is not the center of attention, as in the family, but one of the many equal members of the team. For "home" children, being in a large group of peers can be a stressful situation and make it difficult for them to adapt to school.

So, all components of a child's readiness for school are important and none of them can be neglected. A lag in the development of any of them can cause a child to have serious difficulties in learning and (or) relationships in the classroom, which give rise to a whole range of psychological problems called psychogenic school maladaptation (PSD). A child with this syndrome develops a persistent aversion to school. A first-grader usually formulates it like this: “study is not interesting”, “the guys are bad”, and “the teacher is evil”. PSDD can occur not only in the first grade, but also in the fifth, when moving from primary to secondary, and in any other grade, for example, when changing teachers: if a student has a good relationship with a previous teacher, he may simply not accept a new one. In order to overcome PDD, a student needs the help of not only parents, but also the teacher himself and often a teacher-psychologist.

3.5. Junior schoolchild, teenager and high school student as subjects of educational activity

The child becomes the subject of educational activity from the moment of entering the school. Readiness for schooling (see 3.4) determines how the younger student will master this type of activity. It is the readiness for full-fledged educational activity, its formation and formation as a leader that characterizes the younger student. For him, a comprehensive readiness for school means treating it as an entry into new world, the joy of discovery, readiness for new responsibilities, responsibility to the school, teacher and class. At the heart of the educational motivation of a younger student is an interest in new information.

In elementary school, the child develops the basic elements of learning activities: learning motivation, the necessary learning skills, self-control and self-assessment. Theoretical thinking is developing, which ensures the assimilation of scientific concepts. Within the framework of educational activity, a student, under the guidance of a teacher, masters the content of developed forms of social consciousness: scientific concepts, artistic images, moral values, and legal norms. Under the influence of educational activity, the main mental neoplasms of primary school age are formed: reflection, the ability to act in the mind and plan one's activities. The younger student accepts the authority of the teacher, masters various forms of educational cooperation. In his educational activity, private activities are formed: reading, writing, visual and other creative activity, computer work.

Junior schoolboy as the subject of educational activity, he himself develops and forms within its framework, mastering new ways of mental actions and operations: analysis, synthesis, generalization, classification, etc. It is in educational activity that the main relations of the younger student with society are carried out and the main qualities of his personality are formed in it. (self-consciousness and self-esteem, motivation to achieve success, diligence, independence, ideas about morality, creative and other abilities) and cognitive processes (arbitrariness, productivity), as well as his attitude towards himself, the world, society, people around him. This general attitude is manifested through the child's attitude to learning, the teacher, comrades, and the school as a whole. The hierarchy of authorities changes in the junior schoolchild: along with the parents, the teacher becomes a significant figure, and in most cases his authority is even higher, since he organizes the leading educational activity for junior schoolchildren, is the source of the knowledge gained. Therefore, in disputes between a junior schoolchild and his parents, one of the main arguments on his part is a reference to the teacher's point of view ("And the teacher said so!").

The younger student, having a new position in life, faces a number of difficulties. At the very beginning of schooling for most children, the main difficulty is the need for volitional self-regulation of behavior: it is very difficult for them to sit the whole lesson in one place and listen carefully to the teacher all the time, to comply with all disciplinary requirements. In addition, the daily routine is undergoing significant changes: the child now has to get up early, and when he returns home, he has to devote time to doing homework. It is necessary to adapt children to work at school and at home as soon as possible, to teach them how to use their energy rationally. The task of parents is to organize a new daily routine for the child, and the curriculum should be designed in such a way as to constantly maintain the child's interest in learning and involve his involuntary attention more than arbitrary. Younger students still do not know how to rationally organize their work, in this they need the help of adults. Over time, other difficulties arise: the initial joy of getting to know the school can be replaced by apathy and indifference. This is usually the result of the child's repeated failure to overcome the challenges of the curriculum. It is especially important for the teacher during this period not to lose each student from the field of his attention.

By the end elementary school the student is already beginning to show himself not only as a subject of teaching. He enters into active interpersonal interaction, he has his own opinions and points of view that differ from the positions of significant adults. These are internal indicators of his transition to adolescence, and the external criterion is the transition from primary to secondary school.

Teenager as a subject of educational activity is characterized by the fact that for him it ceases to be the leading one, although it remains the main one, occupying most of his time.

For a teenager, social activity becomes the leading one, carried out within the framework of other types of activity: organizational, cultural, sports, labor, informal communication. In all these activities, a teenager seeks to establish himself as a person, to become a socially significant person. He takes on different social roles, learns to build communication in different teams, taking into account the norms of relationships adopted in them. Educational activity becomes for a teenager one of the types of ongoing activity that can ensure his self-affirmation and individualization. A teenager manifests himself in studies, chooses some means and methods of its implementation and rejects others, prefers some academic subjects and ignores others, behaves in a certain way at school, trying to attract the attention of his peers in the first place, achieves a more equal position in relations with teachers . Thus, he asserts himself, his subjective exclusivity and individuality, striving to stand out in some way.

Learning motivation in a teenager is already a unity of cognitive motives and motives for achieving success. Educational activity is included in his general activity aimed at entering society, mastering norms, values ​​and ways of behavior. Therefore, the content of educational material for adolescents must necessarily reflect the general context of modernity: world culture, socio-economic and life-domestic relations. If a teenager does not feel the connection of the subject being taught with real life, he is likely to doubt its necessity for himself personally and will not make noticeable efforts to master it.

The attitude of a teenager to the grades received and, in general, to academic performance is also changing: if in elementary school academic performance was the main criterion for the success of a peer and the value of his personality, then in the middle classes, students are already able to evaluate each other's personal qualities and their own, regardless of academic performance. Academic performance itself can decrease both in “favorite” and “unloved” subjects, not only due to a change in the emotional attitude to grades and a decrease in their subjective significance, but also because adolescents have many new hobbies that compete with their studies and leave them her less and less time.

Adolescents also change their attitude to the authority of adults. By itself, the position of an adult as a teacher now does not at all mean unconditional acceptance of his authority. In a teenager, authority must be earned, although the authority of adults remains a real factor in his life for a long time, because he remains a schoolchild dependent on his parents, and his personal qualities are still insufficiently developed, allowing him to live and act independently.

Already in the middle of middle school age, most adolescents are faced with the problem of making a decision about the form of continuing their education, since the profile specialization of classes today begins, as a rule, from the eighth grade. Therefore, by this age, adolescents need to decide on the preference for academic subjects of a particular cycle (physical and mathematical, natural sciences or humanitarian). This implies a sufficient formation of a system of stable interests and preferences by the age of 13. In addition to educational interests, adolescents already differ markedly from each other in terms of value orientations. They can be more oriented towards the values ​​of learning, work, public employment, interpersonal relationships, material well-being, spiritual development, etc. These orientations determine the adolescent's decisions about the further form of his education. When focusing mainly on the values ​​of the teaching, the adolescent passes into the status of a senior student.

high school student as a subject of educational activity is specific in that he has already made a certain choice to continue learning. Its social situation of development is characterized not only by a new team that arises during the transition to high school or a secondary specialized educational institution, but also mainly by a focus on the future: the choice of a profession, a further way of life. Accordingly, in the upper grades, the most important activity for the student is the search for value orientations, associated with the desire for autonomy, the right to be oneself, a person who is different from those around him, even those closest to him.

A high school student consciously thinks about the choice of a profession and, as a rule, tends to make a decision about it himself. This life circumstance to the greatest extent determines the nature of his educational activity: it becomes educational and professional. This is manifested in the choice of an educational institution, classes with in-depth training in the necessary subjects, preference and ignoring the subjects of a particular cycle. The latter is no longer determined by the fact that the object is “liked” or “not liked”, as in adolescence, but by whether it is “needed” or “not needed”. First of all, high school students pay attention to those subjects in which they will have to take exams when entering the chosen university. Their educational motivation is changing, since the educational activity itself at school is no longer important in itself, but as a means of implementing life plans for the future.

The main internal motive of educational activity for the majority of high school students is result orientation - obtaining specific necessary knowledge; the orientation of the teaching to the development of knowledge in general, regardless of their need, characterizes very few at this age. Accordingly, the attitude towards academic achievement is changing again: it also acts as such a means. For a high school student, the mark obtained in the “necessary” subject is an indicator of the level of knowledge he has and can play a role in further admission to the university, so high school students again begin to pay special attention to the marks they receive.

The main subjects of educational activity of high school students are the organization and systematization of their individual experience through its expansion, addition, introduction of new information, as well as the development of independence and a creative approach to solving educational problems. In general, we can say that a high school student does not study for the sake of learning itself, but for something more significant, only expected in the future.

The authority of a teacher for a high school student acquires somewhat different properties than for a teenager: a high school student may consider that he is already an adult, “outgrown” the school and its requirements, the authority of the school may generally fall to a minimum. But this does not determine for him the level of authority of each subject teacher as a specialist and personality. Any teacher can be an authoritative person for a high school student, whose opinion is valuable to him.

On the basis of the high school student's desire for independence, he forms a complete structure of self-consciousness, develops personal reflection, realizes life prospects, and forms a level of claims. The correct organization of educational and professional activities largely determines the formation of a school graduate as a subject of future labor activity.

3.6. Formation of educational motivation, its types

Learning motivation is a particular type of motivation included in learning activities and determining the student's need for knowledge. What kind of motivation will be formed in a student depends on a number of factors, among which are the following:

› building an educational system (existing levels of education, opportunities and prospects for transition from one level to another, opportunities to receive education in a particular specialty);

› functioning of a specific educational institution (school, lyceum or gymnasium), teaching staff; psychological atmosphere for teachers and students;

› organization of the educational process (building a schedule of classes, dividing the academic year into segments - quarters or semesters, forms of intermediate and final control of students' knowledge);

› subjective features of the student (age, gender, intellectual development, self-esteem, abilities, features of interaction with other students);

› subjective features of the teacher (first of all, the attitude towards the student and teaching, as well as other features - see 5.1);

› the specifics of the subject (fields of knowledge reflected by it, subjective difficulty for the student, features of teaching methods).

Learning motivation, like any other, is systemic. It is characterized by direction, stability and dynamism. Educational activity, like any other, is motivated by a hierarchy of motives, which can be dominated by either internal motives due to the content of this activity and its implementation, or external motives related to the student's need to take a certain place in the system of social relations (successfully graduate from school, earn a positive attitude). those around you to receive some kind of reward). With age, the development and interaction of the student's needs and motives occur, which leads to changes in their hierarchy. The formation of learning motivation is not just a strengthening of a positive or negative attitude towards learning, but the complication of the structure of the motivational sphere behind this phenomenon: the emergence of new, more mature motives, the emergence of other, sometimes contradictory, relationships between them. Accordingly, when analyzing the motivation of educational activity, it is necessary not only to determine the dominant motive, but also to take into account the entire structure of the motivational sphere of the individual.

Educational motivation begins to take shape in early school age. Initially, it is based interest to new knowledge (see 3.5). In the general psychological sense, interest is the emotional experience of a cognitive need. In everyday everyday speech and in professional pedagogical communication, the term “interest” is often replaced by the concept of motivation, which in this case acts as a synonym: “He has no interest in learning”, “It is necessary to develop cognitive interests”, etc. Such a shift in concepts due to the fact that in the theory of learning it was interest that was the first object of study.

The most important prerequisites for the formation of a student's interest in learning are his understanding of the meaning of educational activity, awareness of its importance for himself personally. Interest in the content of educational material and in the educational activity itself can be formed only on the condition that the student has the opportunity to show mental independence and initiative in learning. How more active methods learning, the easier it is to interest the student, while the presentation of the finished material without setting certain problems for the students does not arouse their interest, although it does not interfere with understanding the content of the training. It follows that the main means of cultivating a sustainable interest in learning is the use by the teacher of such questions and tasks that would require active search activity from students. An important role in this is played by the creation of problem situations, the collision of students with difficulties that they cannot resolve with the help of the available stock of knowledge. In this case, students themselves are convinced of the need to acquire new knowledge or apply already acquired knowledge in new ways.

Only the work that requires a certain degree of tension is interesting. Too light material that does not require the application of mental effort does not arouse interest. But, as already noted in subsection 3.2, the difficulty of the educational material or educational task should be within the student's strength, overcome by his own efforts or with the help of a teacher, while it is important that the student regularly repeat situations of success. Only in this case, the difficulty leads to an increase in interest in learning.

The novelty of the educational material and its diversity, as well as the variety of teaching methods, are also important for the formation of interest. Means of providing these properties of educational material and educational process are not only the introduction of new information into them, the acquaintance of students with ever new objects of study, but also the discovery of new sides in objects already known to students, showing them the new and unexpected in the familiar and ordinary. This is also achieved by the fact that different subjects consider the same objects from different angles. However, knowledge of the new must be based on existing knowledge. The comprehensive use of previously acquired knowledge is one of the main conditions for showing interest in learning, it is important for students to feel their need throughout the entire period of study. Otherwise, there is a great risk not only of forgetting them, but also of forming an indifferent attitude towards this knowledge among students, the emergence of doubts about their necessity.

Significant factors in the emergence of interest in educational material are the emotional coloring of his teaching, the living word of the teacher. If the teacher demonstrates his own interest in the subject, finds vivid, convincing examples, skillfully uses the intonational coloring of the material, the subjective difficulty in mastering even the most difficult subject decreases, and interest in it increases.

The success of educational activity largely depends on the predominance of a certain motivational orientation. In pedagogical psychology, four types of motivational orientations of educational activity are distinguished: 1) on the process (the student enjoys the very process of solving educational problems, he likes to look for different ways to solve them); 2) on the result (the most important thing for the student is the acquired and acquired knowledge and skills); 3) to be assessed by the teacher (the main thing is to receive a high or at least a positive assessment at the moment, which is not at all a direct reflection of the actual level of knowledge); 4) to avoid trouble (teaching is carried out mainly formally, only in order not to receive low marks, not to be expelled, not to conflict with the teacher and the administration of the educational institution).

Studies have established a positive relationship between motivational orientations and the success of learning. The greatest success is ensured by the orientation towards the process and the result, somewhat less - by the orientation towards evaluation. The weakest connection with the success of the exercise has an orientation to avoid trouble. It is easy to see that the basis of process and result orientations are the internal motives of learning activity, and the assessment and avoidance of troubles are based on external motives. It can be seen from this that learning activity is most effectively motivated by an internal motive: the desire to improve the results of one's activities, the thirst for knowledge, the awareness of the need to assimilate it, the desire to broaden one's horizons, deepen and systematize knowledge. Among the external motives of educational activity, the motives for achieving success, the need for communication and dominance have the greatest motivating force. Guided by such a complex of motives, the student is able to persistently and enthusiastically, regardless of fatigue and time, work on educational material (more precisely, on solving educational problems) and at the same time resist other stimuli and other distractions.

A high degree of connection between the level of intellectual development of students and their learning motivation was noted: an initially high level of mental development is, on the one hand, an important condition for the realization of the level of motivation that the child had initially, and on the other hand, a condition for the further formation of positive motivation in the process of learning activities. The relationship with the level of personal development is not so obvious and unambiguous: of course, a high level of personal development necessarily implies that a person has a need for self-improvement, but this need can also be satisfied outside of systematic educational activities taking place within the framework of the “official” educational process.

As noted above, learning motivation has several constant characteristics, including stability and dynamism. Under dynamic motivation is understood as the feature disclosed above, which consists in changing the structure of his educational motivation with the age of the student. Sustainability learning motivation is the ability to maintain the required level of mental activity with a wide variety of factors affecting the state of the student. This ability ensures the relative duration and high productivity of educational activities not only in normal, but also in extreme conditions. For example, during the Great Patriotic War, schools lacked the most elementary educational equipment, there were almost no normal notebooks, ink, and there was not enough fuel to heat the classrooms. However, even under these conditions, the educational process continued: full-fledged lessons were held, schoolchildren actively worked in classes and prepared homework, and none of them referred to the difficulties that everyone experienced. Such a high stability of their educational motivation was given by the awareness of the importance of the activities performed for the whole country, schoolchildren regarded their educational work as a contribution to achieving victory, i.e., in the structure of their educational motivation, along with internal motives, broad social motives also occupied a large place.

Nowadays, even in the absence of such great difficulties, there is often a fluctuation in the stability of students' learning motivation depending on their psychophysical state (fatigue), the duration of the school day (by the end of the day with the accumulation of fatigue, the stability of motivation decreases), relations with a particular teacher (in the lessons of more respected and authoritative teachers and motivation is more stable) and other factors. Studies have shown that the greatest stability of the motivational structure is given by the dominance of internal motivation, in which motivational orientations to the process and to the result occupy the first and second places in the hierarchy of motives, respectively. The main psychological determinants of the sustainability of learning motivation include:

1) the initial type of motivational structure (which particular motives of educational activity dominate in a given person);

2) the personal significance of the subject content of the activity (how important the subject considers the learning process and the result obtained in it, what meaning he sees in learning, how he relates to it);

3) the type of educational task that the student is faced with (the more he is interested in tasks of this kind, the more stable his motivation will be when performing them).

3.7. Features of educational tasks. Psychological requirements for learning tasks

The main component of educational activity is a learning task, on the basis of which the student prepares to solve life problems. The educational task is offered to him in the form of a specific task in a specific educational situation, the totality of which is the educational process. The main difference between the educational task and all other tasks that life puts before a person is that the goal of solving it is not to change the objects with which the subject acts, but to change the subject himself. A student solves a learning problem not just for the sake of solving it, but in order to develop himself on this basis.

learning task is a system formation in which there are two mandatory components: 1) the subject of the task in the initial state; 2) a model of the required state of the subject of the problem, i.e. "given and sought", "known and unknown", "condition and requirement". This applies not only to tasks in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, traditionally understood by the word “task”, in the wording of which the condition and question are clearly distinguished, but also to all other tasks in various subjects. For example, if a student is given the task of memorizing a poem, then the initial state of the subject of this task is the printed text of the poem itself, which is perceived and comprehended by the student only when reading, and the requirement is to store this text in memory, and then reproduce and comprehend it without direct perception. The same applies to memorizing a certain topic in biology, history and other similar subjects - with the difference that in this case it is not necessary to reproduce the material verbatim. On the contrary, the student's ability to retell the given in his own words, without distorting the meaning, is an indicator of his assimilation of this material. Asking an essay on literature on any topic, the teacher gives a condition that consists in the formulation of this topic, and the "sought" is the disclosure of this briefly formulated topic in a fairly lengthy text. In all these cases, the learning task appears as a complex system of information about some phenomenon, object or process, in which only part of the information is clearly defined, while the other part is unknown and can be found only on the basis of solving the problem by searching for new knowledge, transformation, proof. etc.

The structure of any educational task includes the following parts.

1. Subject area is the class of objects in question. What these objects will be depends on the subject for which the task is given. These can be natural phenomena (in biology, geography), abstract numbers and symbols (in mathematics), real persons and their actions and deeds (in history, social science), fictional characters (in literature), lexical and grammatical units (in native and foreign languages), etc.

2. Relations, linking objects included in the subject area. For example, in traditionally understood problems in mathematics, such relationships are stated in the condition of the problem. In any case, it is these relations between objects that give the student the subject of the task in the initial state.

3. Requirement- the goal of solving the problem, what exactly needs to be found. The requirement is usually presented either at the beginning of the task (for example, “Insert the missing letters”, “Choose the correct answer”), or after the presentation of the subject of the problem (a question in mathematics problems).

4. Solution method- a set of actions and operations that must be performed on the condition of the problem in order to obtain its solution. Many tasks have several ways of solving, and which one will be chosen by the student depends on many psychological characteristics of the latter.

Solving problems in various ways expands the possibilities for improving educational activities and the development of its subject itself. When solving problems in one way, the goal of the student is only to find the correct answer. Seeing several possible solutions, he is faced with the choice of the most rational, concise and economical of them. To justify such a choice, it is necessary to use all theoretical knowledge in this area, recall all known methods and techniques for solving and, if necessary, create new ones. At the same time, the student accumulates experience in applying knowledge, which contributes to the development of logical search techniques, the development of creative thinking, and the improvement of research abilities.

To solve the problem, the student must have a certain set of tools that are not included in the problem itself. The means of solving the problem can be:

1) material(tools, machines, devices, models, reagents, preparations, materials for the manufacture of real objects and their models);

2) materialized(texts, diagrams, formulas, tables, graphs, diagrams, illustrations);

3) ideal(knowledge used in solving the problem, recorded in verbal (verbal) form).

The educational task has a number of features that distinguish it from the task of life. One of these features has already been mentioned above: the solution of a learning problem is aimed not at changing the problem itself, but at changing the subject that solves it. As a result of solving educational problems, the student masters generalized methods of action, and this mastery is the main goal of their solution.

The second feature of the learning task is that it is usually ambiguous and not always strictly defined: the student can put into it a slightly different meaning than the teacher, set himself, when solving it, somewhat different from the teacher's goals, not fully realize what exactly is required of him and what role the solution of this or that task plays for its development, although this may be obvious to the teacher. This happens for various reasons: due to the inability to understand the requirements of the task, mixing different relationships (the student to the subject, to the teacher and to specific task). Often it depends on the specifics of the subject's educational motivation.

The third feature of the educational task is that, presenting it to students, the teacher sets certain goals for himself and for them. To achieve any goal, in many cases, it is necessary to solve not one, but several tasks. In turn, the solution of one task can contribute to the achievement of several different learning goals. Consequently, the achievement of any educational goal requires a set of tasks organized in a certain way, in which each of them occupies a logically assigned place. Actually, each subject, each section, topic, task pursues its own goals for the mental development of the student, and the entire educational program, as noted in subsection 2.1, is built primarily on the basis of certain educational goals. Therefore, all components of learning can be called learning tasks, only of a different scale, and then smaller, private learning tasks will be part of larger ones (Fig. 2).

Rice. 2

From such a hierarchical organization of learning tasks follows a number of psychological requirements to them, formulated by E. I. Mashbits.

1. Initially, not one particular learning task should be constructed, but the entire set of tasks as a whole. When constructing this set, first of all, it is necessary to proceed from the general goals of education. These goals determine the goals of studying each academic subject, they, in turn, determine the goals of studying each section of the subject, topic and completing each task. In other words, in the process of constructing a set of learning tasks, it is necessary to go in the direction from the general to the particular.

2. When designing a system of tasks, one must strive to ensure that it ensures the achievement of not only immediate, but also distant educational goals. Unfortunately, in school practice, the focus is on achieving immediate goals, and at best, it is their teachers who formulate them to students. Ideally, when designing and solving learning problems, the student should clearly understand the hierarchy of all learning goals, both immediate and distant. The ascent to the latter goes consistently, purposefully, by generalizing the already mastered means of the training system.

3. Educational tasks should ensure the assimilation of the system of means necessary and sufficient for the successful implementation of educational activities. In practice, as a rule, some elements of this system are used, which ensures the solution of problems of only one class and is insufficient for solving another class of problems.

4. The learning task should be constructed in such a way that the appropriate means of activity, the assimilation of which is provided for in the process of solving problems, act as a direct product of learning. This means that students should be able to directly see the fact that they have mastered certain knowledge, skills and abilities as a result of solving the educational tasks proposed by the teacher. The implementation of this requirement implies that the formulation of the task and the teacher's assistance in solving it should be aimed at students' awareness of their actions - reflection. This helps them to generalize their actions for the further solution of educational problems. E. I. Mashbits notes that, although scientists pay great attention to the issues of reflection, in practice the teacher does not have the means to regulate students' reflection in solving problems. In order for students, when solving educational problems, to consciously perform and control their actions, they must have clear ideas about the structure and means of their solution. They receive information about this from the teacher in the form of a coherent system of orientation.

3.8. Learning actions as a means of solving learning problems. Types of learning activities

Morphological units of any kind of activity are actions. The largest domestic researcher psychological theory activity A. N. Leontiev defined the composition of the activity "nothing but in the form of an action or a chain of actions that are subordinate to private goals that can stand out from the general goal." As shown in subsection 2.2, activity as a whole is determined by a motive, and each action is determined by its goal. At the same time, goals can be correlated with motives in different ways. A. N. Leontiev explained this as follows: the motive of activity can shift to the goal of the action, and then the action turns into an independent activity. The following can be cited as an example of such a shift of a motive to a goal and the transformation of a goal into an independent motive: a student may have different attitudes towards the process of solving a learning problem. If all he cares about is that he needs to solve the problem faster in order to free himself and do more attractive things, solving the problem remains just an action. If the student is interested at least in evaluating the teacher or solving the problem, since he is interested in finding a solution and obtaining a result in itself, then these actions “transfer” into activity, in this case, the activity of learning. Thus, any activity, including educational, consists of actions and is carried out only through them, while the actions themselves can exist outside of activity.

The purpose of the action being performed is present in consciousness (as opposed to the motive, which may not be aware of the subject), and usually the subject is fully aware of this purpose. Conscious actions that make up learning activity, as the student masters them, move to the level of operations - ways to perform more complex actions. Since the actions that the student has already mastered are repeated many times in his further activity, they, according to the laws of skill formation, gradually cease to be consciously controlled by him and become ways to perform actions of a higher level. This can be demonstrated by examples of learning to read, write, and a foreign language.

When a child learns to read, he first remembers the names and outlines of the letters and it is these that he recognizes when reading. Then he begins to merge them into separate syllables, but is not yet able to immediately read the whole word. When the child begins to read whole words, he is faced with the task of understanding the meaning of what he has read, and this becomes his conscious goal. He reads individual letters and syllables already automatically, does not expend conscious effort on recognizing each letter, and their reading turns into an operation - a way of reading the whole word and sentence.

An even clearer example is the mastery of writing. In the first grade, it begins with writing letter elements - sticks, hooks, loops. Then the child begins to write the letters as a whole, learns to connect them in writing, but when writing the first words, the goal is not yet to write the word as such, but to correctly derive each letter and the connections between them. At the same time, the child spends a lot of physical strength: not only the muscles of the hand are tense, but the whole arm, the muscles of the back, often the legs and even the head. Only gradually the main physical load passes to the fingers holding the handle. Gradually, the child brings to automatism the skill of writing letters, his handwriting is formed. By the end of the first grade, a dictation appears among the types of work in the lesson, and a presentation in the second grade. Writing from dictation or from memory already implies an understanding of the meaning of what is written. It is the fixation of thoughts on paper that becomes the conscious goal of the student when writing. He no longer follows the writing of individual letters and does not even notice how he writes them - their writing has become an operation.

When mastering a foreign language, at first sufficient effort is required to master the pronunciation of unusual sounds that are absent in the native language, for example, guttural, nasal. When they are pronounced, the correct movements of the lips and tongue are purposeful, they are consciously controlled according to the method of implementation, they require the effort of the student's will. As this action is practiced, the pronounced sound is included in the syllable, then in meaningful word and finally into a meaningful phrase. The action of his pronunciation is automated, ceases to be controlled by consciousness.

In all these cases, consciousness becomes directed towards more high levels activities. Management of operations is carried out at the level of "background automatism". The process of transition of actions into operations is a manifestation of skill automation (see 3.1). Such operations, which were previously independent actions, are called conscious. Along with them, there are operations in activity that have never been recognized by the subject as independent actions. For example, a child, mastering his native language, verbal speech, intuitively compares the ways of grammatical registration of his statements with the norms of adult speech communication. The child is not aware of these actions, which is why they cannot be defined as such. Therefore, they are operations and from the very beginning are formed unconsciously as a result of imitation. Such actions can be formed either through the internalization of external objective conscious actions that arise in development and learning, or represent the operational composition of mental processes: perception, memory, imagination, thinking. These operations include primarily intellectual mental operations: comparison, analysis, synthesis, abstraction, generalization.

Learning activities can be classified in different ways. For example, in the process of solving each educational task, the following sequence of actions can be distinguished.

1. Goal-setting actions. Before starting to solve a problem, the student must accept it as a task to be completed. At the same time, it is important to correctly understand what exactly should be the result of solving the problem, to realize why and for what purpose it is being solved. Asking such questions, finding answers to them, and subordinating one's behavior to this decision is a complex set of actions.

2. Planning activities. Taking for himself the goal of solving a learning problem, the student is faced with the need to select appropriate actions to solve it, to establish their sequence. At this stage, it is important to understand what should be the result of each individual action and how these intermediate results can be used in the further course of the decision.

3. Performing actions. They represent external actions (subjective and auxiliary, verbal and non-verbal), as well as internal (mental) actions to implement the plan for solving the problem. These actions are also classified according to various criteria:

a) transformative and exploratory actions. This difference is based on what kind of transformations the studied objects undergo and what is the scale of these objects. Under transformative actions are understood as direct manipulations on a specific object in order to identify its properties, while the student may already know the general laws and principles of the functioning of objects of this class (for example, solving a mathematical problem based on previously studied rules, laws and formulas). Research actions aimed at revealing general patterns which were not previously known to the student, and this disclosure can occur purely theoretically, on the basis of an explanation or on concrete examples, the analysis of which is subordinated to the goal of understanding a new generalized mode of action;

b) in relation to cognitive processes, among educational actions, perceptual, mnemonic and mental actions are distinguished. Perceptual actions embody the process of perception and include identification, identification, highlighting the figure against the background, separating the main from the secondary. Mnemic actions are carried out on the basis of the memory process, among them one can single out memorization, information filtering, its structuring, preservation, reproduction. Thinking actions include primarily logical operations - comparison, analysis, synthesis, generalization, abstraction, classification, etc. All these operations are different ways of revealing the existing connections and relationships between objects and within them. According to S. L. Rubinshtein, “thinking correlates, compares each thought that has arisen in the process of thinking with the task, the solution of which is directed by the thought process, and its conditions. The verification, criticism, and control thus carried out characterize thinking as a conscious process. Each complex intellectual learning action includes a large number of often non-differentiable perceptual, mnemonic and mental operations. Due to the fact that they are not specifically singled out in the general group of learning activities, the teacher sometimes cannot accurately diagnose the nature of the student's difficulty in solving the learning task;

c) reproductive and productive activities. To reproductive include reproducing actions carried out according to specified criteria, in a template way. The actions of goal setting, transformation, creation of a new one, performed according to independently formed criteria, are considered as productive. There are also actions that, depending on the conditions, can be both. The reproductive or productivity of many educational activities is determined by how they are carried out: according to the programs and criteria set by the teacher, previously worked out in a stereotypical way or according to self-formed criteria, own programs, a new way, a new combination of means. For example, writing an essay on literature is a productive action, since success in revealing its topic can be achieved in different ways, but if the student is not able to formulate his own thoughts on the topic and “fills the volume” with quotations from critical articles, this action acquires a greater degree of reproduction. . On the other hand, a certain degree of productivity can be introduced into a reproductive action such as solving an equation if the student sets out to solve it in a way that has not yet been studied in the lessons, and for him this will be creativity. It follows from this that within the framework of educational activity, a teacher-managed program of different correlations between the productivity and reproducibility of students' educational actions can be created.

4. Activities of self-control and self-assessment of the student. When solving a problem, each intermediate result obtained, and even more so the final one, is compared with the goal. Thus, it is estimated how close the decision process has come to achieving the goal. The actions of control and evaluation of the student are internalized actions of the teacher, therefore the psychological mechanism of their formation is special (for details, see 3.9).

An analysis of the actions and operations included in the learning activity makes it possible to present it as a process of managing their development, during which each of these actions acts as an independent subject of mastery and control for the student.

3.9. Self-control and self-assessment of the student

In the general structure of educational activity, a significant place is given to the actions of control (self-control) and evaluation (self-assessment) of the student. This is due to the fact that any other educational action becomes arbitrary and regulated only if there is monitoring and evaluation in the structure of activity. Control over the execution of an action within the framework of any type of activity is carried out using a feedback mechanism. The very setting of the goal of the action assumes that the subject has an idea of ​​what specific result should be obtained when it is performed. The goal is defined by many researchers as “a mental image of the desired result of an action”. Performing an action, the subject receives information about the achieved result through his sensations and perception. Getting this information is called feedback. P. K. Anokhin distinguished two types of feedback, depending on whether it carries information about what result: intermediate or final. The first type of feedback is called phased, the second - sanctioning. Due to the existence of feedback, the subject has the opportunity to compare the mental image of the desired result of the action with what actually happens when this action is carried out. The result of such a comparison - what was supposed to be obtained, and what is obtained - becomes the basis for making one of three possible solutions:

1) about the continuation of the action, if this is information about the intermediate result and it matches what was expected to be received at this stage of the action;

2) about the end of the action, if this is information about the final result and it matches the expected or is close enough to the expected to consider the execution of the action successful;

3) about the correction of the action, if the information about the result obtained (intermediate or final) does not agree with the expected.

Thus, the process of monitoring the implementation of an action includes three mandatory components: 1) the image of the desired result of the action; 2) the process of comparing this image with the actual result; 3) making a decision to continue, correct or terminate the action. These three components represent the structure of the subject's internal control over its implementation.

In educational activities, the control function is initially completely assigned to the teacher, since the child, who has just begun to master this activity, still does not know the standards that must be followed and with which his real results will be compared. As each type of learning activity is mastered, the student himself forms his standard results in his mind, and this process is based on mastering the standards presented by the teacher. The process of external control passes into the process of internal control, i.e. self-control, by means of internalization by the student of the teacher's ideas about the criteria for the success of the implementation of educational actions. This transition is prepared by the questions of the teacher, fixing the most important, the main.

P. P. Blonsky outlined four stages of manifestation of self-control in the assimilation of educational material.

1. Lack of any self-control. The student goes through this stage during the initial familiarization with the material. He has not yet mastered the material, in his mind there has not yet been a picture of the standard mastery of it. He has not yet figured out which questions in the material are the main ones, which ones are secondary, what are the logical connections between its parts. Since the desired image of the result of the action to master this material has not yet been formed, self-control at this stage is impossible.

2. Complete self-control. This stage unfolds during the preparation by the student of homework on this material. He forms ideas about what are the criteria for the reference mastery of the material, the manifestation of the knowledge gained and the skills that have been formed. Following these criteria, the student checks the completeness and correctness of his reproduction and understanding of the material being assimilated, but is not always sure of this completeness and correctness to the end.

3. Selective self-control. Usually, after considering several topics that make up a single section of the course, students' knowledge is checked: independent work, a repetitive and generalizing lesson, tests, etc. When preparing for this type of work, the student does not restore the learned material in memory in full, but checks only his understanding of the main issues, the orientation in which serves as a criterion for his assimilation of this section.

4. Lack of apparent self-control. If the studied material is used to further gain knowledge, then possession of it is implied, as it were, by itself. The student must be fully confident that he knows this material, and must not make a conscious effort to control it. For example, knowledge of the multiplication table in the future begins to be used in the study of multiplication and division of multi-digit numbers by a "column", and when mastering this skill, the data contained in the student's memory from the multiplication table are applied automatically, as a rule, he does not doubt his knowledge of these data.

I. A. Zimnyaya gives as an example the passage of four stages of self-control by students when mastering foreign speaking. Each stage corresponds to a certain level of formation of auditory control (Table 2). At each of these levels, the speaker's attitude to the error, the interpretation of his intended actions and the nature of the verbal reaction to the erroneous action are evaluated.

table 2

From Table. Figure 2 shows that the first two levels are characterized by an external controlling influence of the teacher, which determines the formation of internal auditory feedback, and the next two levels are characterized by the absence of such an influence when correcting mistakes. These levels are, as it were, transitional from the stage of consciously controlled performance of a speech action to foreign language to the stage of unconscious control over one's own foreign language speech, speech automatism.

Similarly to self-control, the formation of substantive self-assessment in the structure of activity also takes place. The student does not immediately form an adequate idea of ​​the result of his action as a success or failure, in addition, success can be assessed by a different number of points: the grades “excellent”, “good” and “satisfactory” are all considered positive. In elementary school, students have not yet fully mastered the criteria that the teacher is guided by when evaluating their activities, so they must not only point out mistakes made, but also emphasize successfully completed actions. Thus, the students are laid guidelines that they need to be guided in the future in order to achieve academic success. In the process of interiorizing the teacher's attitudes towards the grades given, the students themselves begin to navigate the assessment criteria and build reasonable assumptions about what grade their knowledge and skills currently deserve. If in grades 2-3 most students always expect to receive high grades and are upset when their expectations do not match the results obtained, then sixth graders can already hear such phrases as, for example: “Four” will suit me today, because I’m on Five, I don't know. This indicates that the student who expresses such an idea has already mastered the criteria for grading the teacher in the subject, knows what level of knowledge of the material deserves which score, and can assess the level of his own knowledge.

The student's assessment of his own academic success makes a significant contribution to his overall self-esteem. This shows the connection between the activity and the personal: the process of evaluation turns into a personal property. This once again testifies to the internal continuity of the two components of the personal-activity approach to education.

3.10. Assimilation is the main product of educational activity. Psychological characteristics of assimilation

Assimilation is the basic concept of all theories of learning (learning activity), regardless of whether it is singled out as an independent process or is identified with learning. Assimilation can be interpreted from different positions. Firstly, assimilation is a mechanism for the formation of a person's individual experience through the "appropriation of experience" of the socio-historical, carried out throughout a person's life as a result of observation, generalization and decision-making and proceeding in various conditions - spontaneously or in special conditions of educational systems. Secondly, assimilation is a complex intellectual activity of a person, including all cognitive processes that ensure the reception, semantic processing, preservation and reproduction of the received material. Thirdly, assimilation is the result of learning, learning activities, their main goal.

In general assimilation can be defined as the process of receiving, comprehending and storing the acquired knowledge and applying it to solve practical and theoretical problems. The main criteria for assimilation are the ability to use knowledge in the form of the ability to solve new problems on its basis, the possibility of exteriorizing knowledge, that is, their embodiment in external, practical, objective actions.

All researchers of assimilation note that this is a heterogeneous process that includes several components, steps or phases. Thus, V. A. Krutetsky didactically interpreted the psychological components of assimilation identified by N. D. Levitov.

1. Positive attitude of students. It is expressed in their attention, interest in the content of the lesson. The positive emotional state experienced in the lesson contributes to the unloading of voluntary attention, which reduces the fatigue of students. If they do not have a positive attitude towards the content of the lesson, their emotional state will not facilitate the assimilation of the material and may even significantly complicate it.

2. The process of direct sensory familiarization with the material. In this component of assimilation, an important role is played by the visibility of the material itself and the observation of students. Much depends on how the teacher will present the material, how he will present it, emphasize the most important issues with his voice, indicate to students what needs to be written down, drawn, drawn. It is in the power of the teacher to make any educational material visual, taking care of the connection between subject, visual (including symbolic) and verbal visibility.

3. Thinking as a process of active processing of the received material. With the logical analysis of the studied material, there is a comprehension and understanding of all connections and relationships, new material is included in the student's already existing experience. Interdisciplinary connections are established, the student sees how to apply the studied material in practice.

4. The process of storing and storing received and processed information. Numerous studies in this area show that the effectiveness of these processes depends on the setting for the conditions of memorization (time, purpose, nature of use in practice) and the student's involvement in his own active activity. So, in terms of setting the importance, significance of the educational material, focusing on the fact that it can be used in life, and at the same time, when comparing it with other previously learned information, it will be retained in memory longer and stronger than if memorization relied only on the understanding of the need to learn the given in order to answer the questions posed by the teacher.

All these psychological components of assimilation are interdependent and are themselves formed in the course of educational activity. Stages, stages of assimilation are correlated with them. S. L. Rubinshtein singled out the following stages of assimilation: 1) initial acquaintance with the material, or its perception in the broadest sense of the word; 2) its comprehension; 3) special work to consolidate it; 4) mastery of the material in the sense of the ability to operate with it in various conditions, applying it in practice. It should be especially noted that both among the components and among the stages of assimilation, the comprehension of the material comes before its memorization. This shows that the memorization of the material in itself does not mean its true assimilation. The main indicator of the student's assimilation of the material for the teacher is whether the student is able to state the essence of the issue being studied in his own words, without distorting the general meaning. This is possible only if the memorization of the material was preceded by its logical interpretation, including the understanding of the scientific terminology used in it. If the material was memorized mechanically, without proper comprehension, the student, when answering, reproduces the text of the textbook, but is not able to look at the issue under consideration from any other point of view.

A younger student can already reproduce a text whose meaning is incomprehensible, therefore, from the very first days of schooling, the teacher must ensure that students are not limited only to mechanical memorization, but wherever possible, use semantic memorization. The fundamental principle of the organization of assimilation is the position of S. L. Rubinshtein that not only repetition, but also free reproduction of educational material should be constantly carried out: “Clarifying, formulating his thought, a person forms it; at the same time, he firmly imprints it. Two conclusions follow from this: students' own presentation should be specially provided for in the organization of educational activities, and it is especially important to prepare the first independent reproduction by students of the material being studied.

The application of knowledge in practice as an indicator of assimilation is not only the result of learning, but also a way of mastering knowledge, consolidating it, and forming strong skills. At this stage of assimilation, mastering the material is no longer aimed at teaching, but at practical life goals.

Assimilation is characterized by several basic properties. The first and most important of them - strength, which is determined by the independence of the use of acquired knowledge and developed skills from the difference in situations and conditions for their application. In general, the strength of assimilation significantly depends on the consistency, semantic organization of the educational material, its personal significance and the emotional attitude that this material evokes in the student. If the educational material itself, its perception, memorization cause a feeling of joy, satisfaction, then this creates the psychological prerequisites for the strength of assimilation. It is better to assimilate what is included in the activity and aimed at use in future practice.

The second characteristic of learning is controllability. Assimilation management can be carried out along the path of the phased formation of mental actions (see 3.1), implemented in the traditional way, through problem-based learning and its other forms. Assimilation is personally conditioned by those relationships that develop in the student in the process of learning to the educational material, the teacher, the teaching itself, and at the same time influences the formation of the student's personality. This mutual influence is realized due to the effect of the action of the training itself on the mental development of the personality, the formation of its mental neoplasms: new motives, goals, strategies for assimilation, evaluation, character, worldview, etc.

The psychological characteristics of the nature of assimilation essentially depend on the age of the students. As they grow up and master learning activities to the full extent, students begin to use more and more means of learning and they change the ratio of reproductive and productive actions in the process of assimilation. Younger schoolchildren still demonstrate their dependence on the structure of the educational material, they always retain the structure of the original during reproduction, they still do not know how to recombine information. The senior student already has all the opportunities for this, and if they are not realized, then the reasons for this are in the wrong organization of education, in attaching too much importance to reproductive actions to the detriment of productive ones.

Assimilation is also characterized by the ease of updating knowledge and their completeness and consistency. In general, all the characteristics of assimilation are evidenced by the actions taken on the basis of the assimilated information.

Teaching is a side of the inherently social learning process - a two-way process of transferring and assimilating knowledge. It is carried out under the guidance of a teacher and is aimed at developing the creative abilities of students.

Entering school marks the beginning of a new age period in the life of a child of primary school age, for which learning becomes the leading activity. In the process of its implementation, the child, under the guidance of a teacher, systematically masters the content of developed forms of social consciousness (science, art, morality, law) and the ability to act in accordance with their requirements. The content of these forms of social consciousness is theoretical. In the process of mastering the content of the listed forms of social consciousness as a product of the organized thinking of many generations of people, the child develops such an attitude to reality that is associated with the formation of his theoretical consciousness and thinking and their corresponding abilities (in particular, reflection, analysis, planning), which are psychological neoplasms of primary school age. The leading educational activity is only at primary school age, therefore, at this age, only the basis of theoretical consciousness and thinking arises and forms in children. In subsequent school ages, where learning activity is no longer the leading one, the development of the theoretical consciousness and thinking of schoolchildren takes place in the process of carrying out learning activities that are closely connected with productive labor and other types of their socially useful activities.

The result of educational activity is not getting a finished product, but mastering the methods and knowledge that will allow you to get any product in the future. The main task of elementary school is to teach the child to learn. The essence of learning activity- appropriation of scientific knowledge, restructuring of the entire personality of the student, i.e. unlike other types of activity, the result of training are changes in the subject itself. These changes occur in the overall development of the child's personality, in mental development as a whole, in the level of knowledge, skills, and in the level of the formed activity itself.

Thus, the paradox of educational activity lies in the fact that, while assimilating knowledge, the child himself does not change anything in this knowledge. For the first time, the child himself, who carries out this activity, becomes the subject of change in educational activity. Educational activity "turns" the child to himself, requires reflection, an assessment of "what I was" and "what I have become." Evaluation of one's own changes, self-reflection is one's own subject of educational activity.

A special examination of educational activity showed that it consists of several interrelated components: a learning task, which in its content is a method of action to be mastered; educational actions, which are actions that result in the formation of a representation or a preliminary image of a learned action and the initial reproduction of the sample; the action of control, which consists in comparing the reproduced action with the model through its image; the action of assessing the degree of assimilation of those changes that have occurred in the subject himself.

learning task- this is the goal of the learning activity accepted and realized by the child; this is what the student must master. The learning task is different from the practical task. A practical task is, for example, “to learn a poem”, “to parse a sentence”, “to solve a problem”, etc. The educational task is connected with the purpose for which one or another practical task must be performed. For example, write off and parse a word to highlight its parts. Thus, when solving a practical problem, the student as a subject achieves a change in the object of his action. The result of such a decision is some modified object. When solving a learning problem, the student also makes changes in objects or in ideas about them by his actions, but in this case the result is a change in the acting subject itself. A learning task can be considered solved only when predetermined changes in the subject have occurred.

Another component of educational activity is the educational actions of schoolchildren, performing which they master the subject mode of action. Learning activities- these are actions that schoolchildren are able to actively perform with educational material and which allow solving a learning problem; it is what the student must do to discover the property of the subject he is studying. According to the degree of generalization, the types of educational actions are general (comparison, analysis, classification, ability to plan one's activities) and specific (related to the educational subject). According to the structure, skills (counting, reading, writing) and skills (method of applying knowledge) are divided. The nature cognitive activity perceptual, mnemonic and mental actions are distinguished. According to functional features, educational actions are planning, controlling, performing, evaluative. Regardless of who sets the method of action for the students (the teacher or they discover it themselves), the learning activities for mastering it begin from the moment the sample is selected.

The next component of the structure of educational activity is control action. This is a correlation with a pattern that is set from outside. Control consists in determining the compliance of other learning activities with the conditions and requirements of the learning task. This is the definition of whether the student has achieved the result or not. Allocate control by result (final); planning control (before the start of work); operational control (tracking the course of action). As the work progresses, the student can say in what way he decides. This is a more mature control that allows you to correct errors. Thanks to this educational action, the child finally masters the acquired method.

Assessment activities allow you to determine whether or not a general way of solving a given learning problem has been learned. Evaluation consists not only in ascertaining the assimilation or non-assimilation of educational material, but in a meaningful, qualitative consideration of the result of assimilation in accordance with the goal. In the practice of teaching, this particular component is highlighted especially brightly.

39. The concept of educational activity and its structure.

The concept of "learning activity" is rather ambiguous. In the broad sense of the word, it is sometimes regarded as a synonym for learning, teaching, learning. In a narrow sense, according to D. B. Elkonin, this is the leading type of activity in primary school age. In his works, the works of V. V. Davydov, A. K. Markova, the concept of “learning activity” is filled with activity content and meaning, correlating with a special “responsible attitude, according to S. L. Rubinshtein, of the subject to the subject of education throughout its entire duration.

It should be noted that in this interpretation, educational activity is understood more broadly than the leading type of activity, since it applies to all ages.

Educational activity in this sense is the activity of the subject in mastering generalized methods of educational actions and self-development in the process of solving educational problems specially set by the teacher, on the basis of external control and evaluation, turning into self-control and self-esteem. According to Elkonin D. B., educational activity is an activity, the content of which is the mastery of generalized methods of action in the field of scientific concepts. Learning activity is an activity that should be stimulated by adequate motives. These may be motives for acquiring generalized methods of action, in other words, motives for one's own growth and improvement.

Therefore, learning activity can be considered as a specific type of activity. It is aimed at the student himself as its subject - improvement, development, formation of him as a person due to the conscious, purposeful appropriation of sociocultural experience by them in various types and forms of socially useful, cognitive, theoretical and practical activities. The activity of the student is aimed at mastering deep systemic knowledge, working out generalized methods of action and their adequate and creative application in various situations.

The result of learning activity is the behavior of the subject, which is either a need (interest, involvement, positive emotions) to continue this activity, or unwillingness, avoidance, avoidance.

Educational activity has its own structure. D. B. Elkonin identified several interrelated components:

Components of learning activities (according to Elkonin):

motivation. Educational activity is polymotivated. It is motivated and directed by various motives. EDUCATIONAL AND COGNITIVE motives (according to Elkonin) - interest in the content side of educational activity, in what is being studied, in the process of activity.

learning task. A system of tasks in which the child masters the most common methods of action. Children, solving many specific problems, themselves discover ways to solve them. Developmental learning involves the joint discovery by children and the teacher of a common way of solving problems.

training operations - are part of the mode of action of operations and training tasks. It is considered the main link in the structure of educational activities. Each training operation must be worked out. Often, according to the Halperin system. The student, having received a complete orientation in the composition of operations, performs operations in a material form under the control of the teacher, having learned to do this without errors, solves the problem in his mind.

control. First, the teacher controls the learning activity, then the students control themselves. Without self-control, it is impossible to fully develop educational activities, so this is the most important pedagogical task. The child needs operational control over the process of learning activities.

grade - the child must learn to adequately evaluate his work with a general assessment - how correctly the task was completed, and an assessment of his actions - how much the method of solving was mastered, what was not worked out ...

Actions and operations in the structure of educational activities. Essential for the analysis of training actions is the moment of their transition to the level of operations. According to A.N. Leontiev, operations are methods of action that meet certain conditions in which its goal is given. A conscious purposeful action in learning, repeated many times, being included in other more complex actions, gradually ceases to be the object of the student's conscious control, becoming a way to perform this more complex action. These are the so-called conscious operations, former conscious actions turned into operations. The transition from the level of action to operations is the basis for the technologization of learning.

Along with conscious operations in activity, there are operations that were not previously recognized as purposeful actions. To such operations, S.L. Rubinstein refers comparison, analysis, synthesis, abstraction, generalization. We note here that the corresponding internal mental operations determine the structure of perception (V.P. Zinchenko), memory (P.P. Blonsky, A.A. Smirnov, V.Ya. Lyaudis) and other mental processes.

Control over the performance of an action is carried out by a feedback mechanism in the overall structure of activity as a complex functional system. Two forms of feedback were identified - guiding and resulting. The first is carried out mainly by proprioceptive or muscle impulses. The second is always complex and encompasses all afferent signs relating to the very result of the undertaken movement. Thus, control involves three links: a model, an image of the required, desired result of an action; the process of comparing this image and the real action and making a decision to continue or correct the action. These three links represent the structure of the subject's internal control over its implementation.

This is the structure of learning activity in its expanded and mature form. Educational activity acquires such a structure gradually, while in a younger student it is far from it. Sometimes a child seeks to correctly evaluate his achievements, understand a task, or exercise control actions.