Sidneva, A.N.

Background. Problems of finding meaning of what is being read can accompany students’ already formed skills of fluent reading, reducing their academic success. The issues of reader’s literacy are in the focus of modern psychological and pedagogical research, and the consideration of the mechanisms of its formation at the initial stages of learning to read is therefore relevant.

Objectives. The study performs the analysis of the quality of children’s orientation in the initial period of learning to read and of the conditions for its actualization.

Study Participants. 26 subjects (6–7 years old) took part in the diagnostic examination, including 10 first-graders and 16 senior preschoolers who studied reading in the kindergarten preparatory group or as a part of preschool training. Experimental teaching for children aged 6–7 years was conducted in two preschool groups of 4 people and in one group of 6 first-graders.

Methods. The assessment of children’s capability to read meaningfully (the first part of the study) was carried out individually according to the modified technique of D.B. Elkonin “fusion of words” (Elkonin, 1998). To test and refine the designed training materials (the second part of the study), 30 half-hour classes were conducted within experimental teaching in each group.

Results. A qualitative analysis of the filled in diagnostic forms and videotaped children’s actions and reasoning allowed us to identify and describe reading strategies demonstrated by children, which we defined as formal (found in 73% of the subjects) and meaningful (27%) — in accordance with the nature of attempts to comprehend what they read, which participants resorted to in the process of deciphering the “fusion of words”. The results of our experimental teaching showed the effectiveness of the approach we developed to create some conditions for meaningful mediation of initial reading.

Conclusions. One of the important conditions for the formation of the meaningfulness in reading during the transition “from letters to words” is to provide the orientative function of referring to reality, standing both for the word itself and for the sentence in which it should be read correctly. The method of “end-forward” reading of deformed words and simplest texts, which we developed, can be considered as a resource for improving the literacy in initial reading.

Background of this study is determined by the increased interest in mathematical education in recent years. Teachers and researchers are concerned about the conditions and means of developing mathematical education. Along with this, there is no consensus on what constitutes mathematical abilities, what is their structure and development.

Objective of this study is to compare the development of mathematical skills of first-graders in different educational programs and to identify specific to each program features.

The study sample consisted of 434 first-graders of Moscow schools (54.8% of boys), among which: 37.1% of first-graders learn programs of increased complexity, 44% ― traditional programs, 18.9% ― developmental education program.

Methods. An author's set of tasks was developed to diagnose the mathematical skills of first-graders in this study. It included "classical" tasks children must perform regardless of the training program and "specific" tasks that test the awareness of meaning of the mathematical actions performed.

Results. The analysis showed that most of the classical mathematical skills are not related to the character of the program and it developed by all first-graders in the course of training. However, complex arithmetic skills (working with two-digit numbers and searching for an unknown sum component) developed more effectively in programs of increased complexity. Specific skills related to reasonable action with a number (tasks for a number line or measurement) showed an ambiguous development dynamic. It allows us to assume that the content of programs does not affect specific skills.

Conclusion. This study allows us to form a hypothesis that the selecting students for programs affects only the rate of development of a number of classical mathematical skills. Whereas specific skills are more dependent on the content of the program. It requires further study.

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” 

Based on the critical examination of existing models of the psychological analysis of the lesson (PAL), we suggest a model of PAL, developed from the positions of the activity approach (A.N. Leontiev, P.Ya. Galperin, N.F. Talysina, V.V. Davydov, D.B. Elkonin). As the critical review shows, the basic models of the PAL in traditional didactics are related to the evaluation of the degree of implementation in the lesson of conditions for the effective functioning of students' mental processes. This model is based on the idea of a quality lesson as a lesson that maximizes the use of various types of mental processes (processes of thinking, memory, attention, imagination, etc.). From the point of view of the activity approach, psychological analysis should presuppose an assessment of the extent to which the activities that children realize in the lesson are adequate to the goals of the lesson set by the teacher. So a quality lesson is a lesson in which students carry out activities psychologically adequate to the goals set. The article proposes five criteria for the PAL, which correspond to the principles of the activity approach: 1) the specifics of setting the objectives of the lesson, 2) the adequacy of the actions performed by the students, the stated goals; 3) the features of action means, 4) the features of control and feedback and 5) the features of assessing the performance of students' actions. An example of a lesson analysis scheme developed on the basis of the proposed model is given.

Background. The formal, shallow assimilation of school knowledge is studied in psychological and pedagogical science under different terms, each of which has a separate research area. Naive concepts, a “superficial” learning approach, functional illiteracy, the gap between knowledge and application — within the framework of this far from complete list, the same phenomenon of formalism is studied. In fact, overcoming the formalism is one of the key tasks of modern school education.

Objective. This paper compares different approaches to the analysis of the functional meaning of formalism mistakes, highlights the specifics of the activity approach to student mistakes, and describes the prospects for this approach.

Methods. In order to study the formalism of knowledge within the approaches, outlined above, functional analysis was applied as “the analysis of a mental phenomenon in relation to the performed socially-determined function”.

Results. The analysis shows that the errors of the formalism of school knowledge in most approaches are viewed negatively as something that must be avoided. However, from the point of view of the activity-based approach, the formalism mistakes are a necessary type of feedback for teachers and programme developers, pointing to specific areas of modification of the learning process, thus acting as one of the most important means of identifying key psychological and pedagogical conditions for the effective assimilation of new concepts.

Conclusions. Based on the work carried out, the need for further research of formalism within the framework of the activity approach is substantiated — an analysis of existing curricula from the perspective of which specific conditions for effective assimilation and development are supported in them and which are not. The theoretical significance of the proposed approach to the study of the formalism of knowledge is to highlight the prospects for the development of modern psychology of teaching.

Students’ mistakes in problem solving are analyzed from the positions of activity approach. Each type of students’ mistakes is connected to certain conditions of students’ activity organization during the lesson. We analyzed the mistakes, which students make when they do not turn to the knowledge obtained before problem solving. It has been demonstrated that students from different educational systems have differences in the frequency of mistakes in question.

Two approaches to teaching the ability to learn in the Russian psychological and pedagogical sciences are analyzed in the article. The first one means we teach the ability to learn directly and the second focuses on developing this ability by changing the content and forms of learning. We come to the conclusion about the connection between these approaches with understanding the specifics of learning.