Plotnikova, Valeria A.

Introduction. Within the framework of the actual problem of the ability to learn for a modern school the peculiarities of children's reading comprehension of edu-cational texts were studied. The analysis showed that the problem of reading com-prehension is not sufficiently developed from the standpoint of Cultural Activity Approach, since in existing studies (I.I. Ilyasov, I.V. Usacheva, O.E., Malskaya, etc.), the activity aspect is expressed only in a detailed description of the actions that provide reading comprehension and their structure, but these works do not “grasp” the general meaning of these actions related to the students' understanding of the indicative purpose of educational texts — that it is from their content that the indicative basis of the subject actions performed should be ex-tracted. The most clearly indicative purpose of a special type of educational text — the definition of a concept — is justified in studies of the formation of the recogni-tion action (RA) (P.Ya. Galperin, N.F. Talyzina, L.F. Obukhova, etc.), where the “understanding” of the definition is the ability to recognize the objects that are described by it. The goal: to study the ability of students to perceive educational texts (ordinary educational texts and definitions of concepts) as tools for completing of specific tasks. Methods and sample. A sample of students in grades 4–8 (N = 280) was conducted: 1) assessment of the formation of the ability to work with definitions of concepts (concept’ recognition tasks, developed on the basis of the principles of diagnostics by N.F. Talyzina), 2) assessment of the ability to highlight the main thing in the text (the method of O.E. Malskaya and A.A. Sidelnikova “Selection of main sentences” for grades 4–8), 3) assessment of the ability to structure the text (the task of selecting paragraphs and their heading), 4) two GIT subtests (“Execution of rules” and “Numerical series”). Results and conclusions. It was shown that the understanding of definitions significantly and positively correlates with the understanding of educational texts. It was also revealed that the level of formation of both the ability to work with definitions and the ability to work with texts does not significantly increase after the 4th grade and up to the 8th grade there is a “failure” in these parameters, despite the smooth positive dynamics in some intellectual abilities.

Acknowledgements:

The study was supported by the RFBR grant No. 19-013-00717 “Orientation to a given knowledge as an indicator of the ability to learn from schoolchildren”