The Value-Semantic Basis of Pedagogical Activity: a Comparative Analysis of the Position of Teachers and Pupils of Pedagogical Classes

The relevance of the research is justified by the tendency to implement the axiological approach in education in the context of the need to construct a single space for the training of pedagogical personnel, therefore the question of the value-semantic expectations from the teaching profession is important. The purpose of the work is to determine the teachers and pupil’s value-semantic foundations of pedagogical activity. Sample of the study: 61 pupils of teacher classes, 425 teachers. Methods: operationalization of existing standards (educational and professional) and conceptual content analysis, which made it possible to develop an author’s methodology of values, laid down by educational and professional standards and adapt the MUST-test (for diagnosing values for purposes). Results: pupils are focused mainly on themselves, and teachers are focused on creating conditions for their activities. The system-forming values of the first — the ability to implement an individual approach to the child and knowledge of developing technologies, and the second-knowledge of the characteristics and technologies for creating a safe and comfortable educational environment. Diagnosed the tendency for teachers to replace the actual values with the declared. Teachers and pupils have approximately equal values-relationships aimed at the educational environment and professional activity, but values whose goal is the child occupy lower places in the rating. In both groups all values are expressed approximately equally, but they put different personal meaning into them.

Impact of Life Perspective on Students’ Psychological Readiness for Professional Activity as Psychologists in Education

This paper is aimed at studying the impact of life perspective on the formation of psychological readiness for professional activity in psychology students who have chosen to work in the educational system. We present materials of an empirical study obtained on a sample of 2—4-year students of the Faculty of Psychology of the Pedagogical Institute of the Belgorod State National Research University. The sample consisted of 80 undergraduate students of the Educational Psychology program, aged from 20 to 23 years, 56 females and 24 males. The following techniques were used: “Motivation for Professional Activity” (by K.Zamfir, modified by A.A.Rean), “Professional Readiness” (by A.P.Chernyavskaya), “The Method of Motivational Induction” (by J.Nütten, adapted by D.A.Leontiev) and “Life-Purpose Orientations Test” (by J.Crumbaugh, L.Maholik, adapted by D.A. Leontiev).The study showed that meaningful perception of life perspective determines the development of motivational, cognitive and emotional components of readiness for professional activity in psychology students.

Relationship between Volitional Regulation and Academic Achievements in University Students

The paper presents results of a study on the relationship between the features of volitional regulation and academic performance in university students of different years and areas of training.The study compared students (year 1 to 4) of ‘Psychology’ (n=133) and ‘State and Municipal Administration’ (n=201) programmes.The following methods were used: the Action Control Scale by J.Kuhl; the questionnaire for revealing the expression of self-control in the emotional sphere, activity and behavior (developed by G.S.Nikiforov, V.K.Vasilyev and S.V.Virsov); the Dembo-Rubinstein self-esteem scale (modified by V.A.Ivannikov and E.V. Eidman, 1990); the Purpose in Life Test (by D.A.Leontiev).The arithmetic mean of all examination marks received by the student during the current academic year was used as an indicator of academic performance.It is shown that in junior students of the management programme the indicator of academic performance positively correlates with the indicators of the Action Control Scale (p <0.01), the Purpose in Life Test (p <0.01) and behavioral self-control (p <0.01), whereas in students of the psychology programme it positively correlates with indicators of the Purpose in Life Test (p <0.01) and social self-control (p <0.01).No significant correlations were found in senior students.The results obtained in the study allow us to draw some conclusions about the contribution of volitional regulation to the level of academic achievements in students.

Students’ Conceptions of Academic Success: Themes, Guiding Lines and Contradictions

Academic success is a popular topic of psychological and pedagogical studies, but such studies usually emphasize factors that affect academic success or variables associated with it.What constitutes academic success remains an open question if at all posited.Researchers tend to use simplified operationalizations, mainly the academic performance, and ignore the students’ point of view.The purpose of this study is to clarify students’ perceptions of academic success.A qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews about learning experience was conducted.The study involved 20 students from various Moscow universities who completed their first academic year (aged 17—42).The technique of reflective thematic analysis was applied.Main themes are the following: “Performance” (learning is considered successful if grades are high and there are no academic troubles), “Knowledge” (learning is successful if the curriculum is being assimilated, or professional knowledge increasing, of one’s horizons are expanding), “Sense of self” (learning is considered successful if there is interest in studying, enthusiasm, as well as internal comfort and/or self-development).Themes are arranged in a sequence, moving from external criteria to internal ones.A number of contradictions are found in the informants’ perceptions of success.In the continuum of themes, different understandings of success are attributed to different instances (university, profession, life activities, Self) and allow us to see the diversity and inconsistency of higher education meanings that explain the observed paradoxes.

Gender Differences in the Recognition of Emotional States

As a rule, gender differences in the perception of human emotional states are studied on the basis of static pictures of face, gestures or poses. The dynamics and multiplicity of the emotion expression remain in the «blind zone». This work is aimed at finding relationships in the perception of the procedural characteristics of the emotion expression. The influence of gender and age on the identification of human emotional states is experimentally investigated in ecologically and socially valid situations. The experiments were based on the Russian-language version of the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT).83 audio-video clips of fourteen emotional states expressed by ten specially trained professional actors (five men and five women, average age 37 years) were randomly demonstrated to Russian participants (48 women and 48 men, Europeans, ages ranged from 20 to 62 years, with a mean age of 34 (SD = 9,4).It is shown that women recognize multimodal dynamic emotions more accurately, especially those which were expressed by women. Gender and age differences in identification accuracy are statistically significant for five emotions: joy, amusement, irritation, anger, and surprise. On women’s faces, joy, surprise, irritation and anger are more accurately recognized by women over 35 years of age (p<0,05).On male faces, surprise is less accurately recognized by men under 35 (p<0,05); amusement, irritation, anger — in men over 35 (p<0,05). The gender factor of perception of multimodal dynamic expressions of the state acts as a system of determinants that changes its characteristics depending on a specific communicative situation.

Socialization Problems in Orphans and Children Without Parental Care

The process of social adaptation in graduates of orphan organizations occurs simultaneously with their socialization: as adolescents become involved in various life situations, they acquire new repertoires of social behavior or employ the ones they already have. Special attention should be paid to the specifics of development in adolescents brought up in socially deprived conditions since they tend to demonstrate asocial motivation, communicative deficits and try to avoid performing social roles. The article focuses on the problematic issues of socialization of orphans and children without parental care. To explore life situations typical for the period of independent living of graduates of orphan organizations, we used a special methodological tool: cases of life scenarios. We carried out the analysis of 452 cases of life scenarios in graduates aged 18—23 years, 262 male and 190 female. The analysis revealed the following problems of socialization and social adaptation of orphans and graduates of organizations for orphans and foster families: insufficient level of knowledge in matters of education, vocational education and employment, low goal-setting skills. We highlight the facts that are prototypical in the description of a life scenario, and these events are at the same time typical for graduates of various forms of foster care and orphan organizations.

Subjective Well-Being of 10- and 12-year-old Children in the Space of Satisfaction with Family, School and Friends

The research presented in the article aims to identify the joint influence of family, school relationships and relationships with friends on overall life satisfaction and subjective well-being in children. The experiment was implemented within the framework of the International Survey of Children’s Well-being — Children’s Worlds (ISCWeB).In the course of the study we have developed a special set of tools for classifying children’s satisfaction with family, school, and friends. The analysis of the formed clusters allowed us to take into account the multidimensionality and heterogeneity of the phenomenon. The adaptation and testing of the proposed technique was carried out on a sample of 1959 schoolchildren of the Tyumen region, aged 10 and 12 years. According to the results, the number of clusters formed and their qualitative composition are not uniform, which confirms the age dynamics of the phenomenon.10-year-old children are more categorical in assessing their well-being and satisfaction with life: they are either satisfied with life or not satisfied.12-year-old children are more detailed in assessing life satisfaction; they are able to identify various spheres and aspects of their lives and to carry out a differentiated assessment.

Child Survey as an Essential Part of Child Well-Being Index Design

The article is aimed at analyzing the possibilities of measuring child well-being and creating a child well-being index in Russia. It presents the materials of an empirical study that involved pilot surveys of children aged 10 to 17 (N=1942) and parents of children of the same age (N=1589) conducted in the Tambov region. The Index is based on six main areas of child well-being (domains): education, safety, health, material well-being, social relations, self-realization. The results obtained make it possible to compare the notions of parents and children about various aspects of well-being. We argue that children’s position is essential for a comprehensive assessment of child well-being, and thus interviewing children must be a necessary element in any child well-being index design.

Improving Low Academic Performance: Opportunities and Deficits in Russian Schools

The paper analyzes the notions of parents and teachers about the reasons behind low academic achievements of children as well as about the opportunities to overcome learning difficulties provided by modern Russian schools. The study uses data from surveys of parents, students and teachers of comprehensive schools conducted as part of the Monitoring of the Economics of Education (IEE) implemented by the National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) in the academic year 2020-2021.It is shown that the parents of low-achieving students notice the lack of attention from schools to the problems of children with learning difficulties, the lack of additional classes and support from specialists to overcome these difficulties. This group of parents demonstrates a higher level of willingness to transfer their children to another school. As for the teachers working in schools with a large number of poorly performing students, they tend to have a lower sense of responsibility for the academic success of students and a higher level of dissatisfaction with the choice of profession. They are less likely to receive support from various specialists (psychologists, special needs teachers, etc.), and as they realize they lack the professional skills necessary for working with children with learning and behavioral difficulties, they tend to engage more in professional development activities. The paper concludes that the psychological climate existing in classes and schools with a high proportion of underachieving students is an impediment in overcoming low academic performance, and that the groups of parents and teachers experiencing the greatest difficulties in providing quality education also experience the greatest deficit of support.

On the Problem of Creating a Model of the “School of the Future”

How would we like to see the school of the future? The answer to this question is searched in many countries, including Russia. The proposed conceptual solutions are based on different theoretical foundations, and this determines the key differences between them. The scientific school of developmental education has produced a model of the school of the future for primary school age, known as the “Elkonin-Davydov system”. The adolescent school model is still under development. Having based on the key provisions of the developmental education’s theory, the article proposes a vision of what the goals, content and forms of education in a adolescent school should be. The formation of the ability to be the subject of various types of socially significant activities is defined аs the central line of adolescent development. Thus the principal new psychological formation shaped by adolescent school is practical consciousness and the corresponding reasonable (meaningful) practical thinking. It is argued that in adolescent school, socially significant activity is implemented though project activity (designing). Project activity can become a form of development for students if, in the process of its implementation, they master this very activity. It means that the content of education should include both subject and meta-subject elements. Accordingly, the structures of action in learning activity should unfold in two dimensions: subject and meta-subject.