Psychoprophylaxis of school failure in younger schoolchildren. School failure: causes, psychocorrection, psychoprophylaxis

Textbook St. Petersburg: Peter, 2009. - 368 pp. The manual examines a number of factors influencing the success of school education, outlines the psychological, psychophysiological, psychological and pedagogical reasons for school failure of primary, middle and high school students. The features of the development of cognitive, motivational, emotional, voluntary-regulatory spheres in students with cognitive difficulties in learning are described. The reasons for the difficulties of younger schoolchildren in learning the Russian language, reading and mathematics are given. The book pays significant attention to the issue of psychoprophylaxis of school failure.
A special feature of this textbook is the inclusion after each topic of fragments from psychological and pedagogical works of different authors in order to provide deeper and more detailed coverage of the relevant problem.
The manual is intended for students of psychological and pedagogical faculties, school psychologists, primary and secondary school teachers. Content
Preface
Introduction
Basic Concepts to Understand
Approaches to diagnosing and correcting school failure.

Rubinstein S. L. Fundamentals of general psychology
Test questions and assignments Main factors influencing the success of school education
Neuropsychological and psychological-pedagogical factors and their influence on school performance
Basic Concepts to Understand
Texts for self-study
Ushinsky K. D. Time to start systematic training
Vygotsky L. S. Thinking and speech. Psyche, consciousness, unconscious
Chuprikova N. I. Correlation of external conditions
and internal development factors
Elkonin D. B. Learning and mental development in primary school age
Test questions and assignments

Mental development as a factor in the success of educational activities
Basic Concepts to Understand
Texts for self-study
Chuprikova N. I. The concept of cognitive representative structures as a systemic basis for the acquisition of knowledge and mental development
Kalmykova Z. I. Mental development of schoolchildren,
those lagging behind in learning
Test questions and assignments
Psychological factors and their influence on school performance.
Psychological readiness of a child for schooling
Basic Concepts to Understand
Texts for self-study
Nechaev A.P. When should you start teaching a child to read?
Komensky Y. A. What activities should children gradually practice from birth, so that in the sixth year of their life they will have mastered these exercises
Test questions and assignments
Psychological factors and their influence on school performance.
Individual psychological characteristics of temperament and their influence on the success of educational activities.
Basic Concepts to Understand
Characteristics of temperament and mental abilities
Texts for self-study
Gurevich K. M. Psychological manifestations of properties
nervous system
Akimova M. K., Kozlova V. T. Taking into account the individual typological characteristics of students in the learning process
Test questions and assignments Psychological characteristics of low-performing schoolchildren
Characteristics of the development of the cognitive sphere of children lagging behind in learning
Basic Concepts to Understand
Characteristics of cognitive activity
low performing schoolchildren
Psychological characteristics of “average” schoolchildren in terms of academic performance
Features of cognitive development of students in grades VII-X
Intellectual passivity
Content

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The manual examines a number of factors influencing the success of school education and outlines the psychological, psychophysiological, psychological and pedagogical reasons for school failure of primary, middle and high school students. The features of the development of cognitive, motivational, emotional, voluntary-regulatory spheres in students with cognitive difficulties in learning are described. The reasons for the difficulties of younger schoolchildren in learning the Russian language, reading and mathematics are given. The book pays significant attention to the issue of psychoprophylaxis of school failure. A special feature of this textbook is the inclusion after each topic of fragments from psychological and pedagogical works of different authors in order to provide deeper and more detailed coverage of the relevant problem. The manual is intended for students of psychological and pedagogical faculties, school psychologists, primary and secondary school teachers. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders. Recommended by the Academic Council of the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education as a textbook - an anthology for students of psychological and pedagogical specialties.

A series: Tutorial (Peter)

* * *

by liters company.

Introduction

Weak children are not ugly, but the most fragile, most delicate flowers in the infinitely diverse flower garden of humanity.

Basic Concepts to Understand

Long-term psychodiagnostics– identification of deficiencies in educational activities and behavior over a sufficiently long period of time.

Underachieving schoolchildren– schoolchildren whose educational results are much lower than the requirements of the educational process.

Education– a system of scientific knowledge, abilities and skills, the mastery of which ensures the comprehensive development of mental and physical abilities of schoolchildren, the formation of their worldview, morality and behavior, preparation for social life and work.

Education– the process of active interaction between the teacher and the student, as a result of which the student develops certain knowledge and skills based on his own activity; joint activity of student and teacher, ensuring the assimilation of knowledge by schoolchildren and mastering the methods of acquiring knowledge.

Operational psychodiagnostics– identifying the causes of shortcomings and difficulties in educational activities and behavior based on the analysis of oral and written answers and the student’s actions.

Pedagogical diagnostics and correction– identifying the causes of failure to assimilate knowledge and difficulties in educational activities based on observation data and analysis of the products of schoolchildren’s activities and eliminating them by influencing externally observable shortcomings.

Polycausal conditionality of school failure– a multiplicity of various external and internal factors that negatively affect the quality of the process of knowledge acquisition.

Psychological diagnostics– a type of cognitive activity of a psychologist aimed at clarifying the essence of individual psychological characteristics of a person in order to assess their current state and develop recommendations.

Psychological correction– the focus of psychological influences on specific psychological structures in order to change certain psychological indicators for the full development and functioning of the individual.

Learning difficulties– subjective experience of a discrepancy between the requirements of educational activities and the intellectual capabilities of the student.

Educational activities– specific human activity aimed at mastering certain knowledge, skills, behaviors and types of activities.

School failure– discrepancy between the student’s educational achievements and the requirements of the school curriculum.

This training course is devoted to the school problems of children, various reasons (psychological, pedagogical, psychophysiological) of the difficulties that many schoolchildren experience when studying at school. The subject of the course is the psychological causes of school failure and ways to eliminate them. The objective of the course is to study the internal and external factors that determine the emergence of various kinds of difficulties in learning and the formation of an “alloy” of psychological knowledge and the ability to use it in practice.

The importance of the school period in a person’s life cannot be overestimated. Much in a person’s life depends on how it develops - successfully or unsuccessfully, including many personal qualities that are formed under the influence and as a result of certain features of the school period of a person’s life. Many of an adult's problems can be better understood by looking back to his years in school. The point is not even whether a person studied successfully or unsuccessfully, but how comfortable he felt at school, whether he wanted to go to school every day, how his relationships with teachers and classmates developed. It is under the influence of these circumstances that certain personal qualities are formed. In many ways, this depends not so much on the student himself, but on what the school process itself is like, how it is organized, and how society sees the goals and objectives of schooling.

What are the objectives of education in general and schooling in particular?

In modern conditions, the tasks of education are changing: they no longer come down to the transfer of ready-made knowledge and arming with solutions for all occasions, but to the formation of the ability to quickly and fully navigate in constantly changing circumstances. Today, a modern person is capable of adapting to the conditions of life around him. Education as a whole should be aimed at acquiring precisely this skill.

Mastering knowledge in the process of school education with all clarity and distinctness should act not as a goal, but as a means of developing the personality of schoolchildren. The main task of school education is to form in children such a psychological mechanism that would allow them to further carry out the process of self-realization, self-development, so that the cognitive need of schoolchildren does not fade away once and for all while still at school, so that it drives them in the future and in adulthood. Throughout life, a person would retain a thirst for knowledge and would receive satisfaction from it. “The student,” wrote K. D. Ushinsky, “is not a vessel that needs to be filled, but a torch that needs to be lit.”

However, in primary school, learning skills are much more important than knowledge itself. Of course, the ability to read well entails knowledge, but what is most important is the skills themselves - reading, writing, speaking, counting. The main goal of primary school is to develop these study skills. Children who have low levels of development fail in school and lose the chance to succeed in life.

We are all different in our abilities, character, worldview, physiological and mental properties. Some are smart, others are not very smart, some are hardworking, others are lazy, some are talented, others are untalented, some are purposeful, others are scattered and uncollected. There is no equality in nature. Previously, individuality was considered a great sin, because the individual was nothing in front of the collective. Now we understand that without bright, talented, thinking individuals there cannot be a highly developed society. School plays a very significant role in the formation of such individuals, and its importance cannot be overestimated. Of course, for the formation of a person as a whole, it is important how successful he was in learning. But even more important is how he felt at school, how comfortable he was in his relationships with teachers and classmates.

It is generally accepted that an external indicator of a child’s school well-being is his academic performance, but not all children can achieve “good” or “excellent” grades. However, everyone should feel comfortable at school and not feel embarrassed because of failures in their studies. Therefore, the task of a school psychologist is to create an atmosphere at school that is conducive to the development of the personality of each student, the formation of self-esteem, self-respect, significance, and the uniqueness of his personality. This is largely hampered by the failure of schoolchildren in learning, which, if help is not provided in time, affects the quality of knowledge acquisition and the formation of negative personal qualities - conformism, deceit, opportunism, negative attitude towards work, lack of self-confidence, low self-esteem.

It is known that from 15 to 40% of primary school students experience various difficulties in the process of schooling. But it is precisely the requirement to study well, even when the child’s abilities cannot meet this requirement of adults, that leads to problems for him. The main indicator of success in school is the grades a student receives in class. It is towards getting a good grade (at any cost) that teachers and parents orient the child. Therefore, it is not surprising that schoolchildren see the meaning of their teaching in it. A pursuit of marks appears, which ultimately deforms the child’s personality.

“I have always thought with great concern about the psychosis of the pursuit of excellent grades - this psychosis is born in the family and captures teachers, places a heavy burden on the young souls of schoolchildren, cripples them. At this time, the child does not have such abilities to study excellently, and his parents demand only A’s from him, in extreme cases, they put up with B’s, and the unfortunate student, receiving C’s, feels almost like a criminal.” (Sukhomlinsky V.A., 1969b. – P. 103.)

An increasing number of teachers are realizing that students are not a homogeneous mass, but that each student is an individual, unique, unique and unrepeatable, characterized by his own individual psychological characteristics, abilities, and needs. There comes an understanding that all students cannot master the material in the same way due to these characteristics and there is no need to make the same demands on everyone: what is bad for one is good for another. This state of affairs led, ultimately, to the emergence of a special direction in the activities of psychologists - school psychodiagnostics, aimed at understanding the individual psychological characteristics of schoolchildren in order to identify the causes of various kinds of difficulties in the educational activities of students of different ages, to overcome and prevent deviations in the intellectual and personal development of schoolchildren.

The specificity of psychodiagnostics in school psychological services is that its main task is to identify the level of development in students of certain personality substructures (cognitive, motivational, emotional, volitional), in order not only to anticipate the occurrence of certain educational difficulties in them, but and carry out psychological correction of developmental deficiencies.

School psychodiagnostics plays an important role in preventing and overcoming school failure in students. The task of the educational process is not only the assimilation of a knowledge system, but also ensuring a high level of mental development of schoolchildren and their mental development in general. Therefore, it is important to monitor how this mental development is carried out, what difficulties students have in the process of mastering knowledge, and the timely elimination of those factors that lead to learning difficulties and, consequently, to a decrease in school performance. Essentially, this is control over the quality of the educational process.

However, traditionally, the effectiveness of the educational process is determined by what schoolchildren know and can do. This is important, but not enough, since it remains unclear to what extent the learned material becomes the property of the student’s personality, which allowed the assimilation of this or that educational material for the further development of the student’s thinking, abilities, and beliefs. In other words, it remains unclear how effective the educational process itself is.

The teacher does not always have the opportunity to promptly identify the causes of various kinds of difficulties in educational work with students of different ages, overcome deviations in the intellectual and personal development of schoolchildren, and provide psychological assistance in resolving conflict situations. At the same time, the teacher’s conduct of operational and long-term psychodiagnostics is one of the important aspects of his professional activity. Most often in his psychodiagnostic activities, the teacher uses an intuitive-empirical approach, which consists in the fact that the teacher, relying only on his experience and intuition, often assesses the student’s problems, his educational difficulties without sufficient information about the student, without understanding the true motives of his actions and actions, using mainly their impressions of the child. According to our data, the unreliability of this approach is manifested in the fact that approximately 60% of teachers, based only on their experience and knowledge of the student, indicated the reasons for students’ difficulties incorrectly, about 30% of teachers identified them incompletely or partially incorrectly, and only 10% of respondents teachers correctly understood the reasons for the occurrence of certain difficulties among students. This confirms the idea that “by eye”, without using psychodiagnostic techniques and methods, it is almost impossible to understand the psychological causes of certain difficulties in the educational activities of schoolchildren, and, consequently, to carry out effective correctional work.

However, a significant difficulty arises here. The fact is that there is no direct and unambiguous correspondence between the visible manifestations of difficulties and their psychological causes. It is quite likely that the same external manifestation of difficulties has different psychological causes in different students, and it is also possible that learning difficulties that differ in external manifestations in different students have at their core the same cause.

In this regard, it should be said about the most important thing that determines success in identifying the causes of various kinds of schoolchildren’s learning difficulties. It consists in the ability to understand the nature of the reasons that determine the appearance of certain difficulties of the student. The fact is that, when dealing with observable symptoms and external behavioral indicators, it is necessary, based on their study, comparison, interpretation, to make a judgment about some psychological phenomenon, its causes that are not amenable to direct perception. Even L. S. Vygotsky and S. L. Rubinstein noted the following:

The absence of a direct, mirror coincidence of the essence of things with its manifestation and the existence, at the same time, of unity between the internal and external;

The impossibility of automatically establishing the real cause of a particular phenomenon solely on the basis of studying externally observable manifestations. To penetrate into the inner essence of mental processes, mental processing of external, behavioral data is necessary, taking into account their systemic connection with psychological processes occurring at a level hidden from direct observation.

Guided by these provisions and using the results of the analysis of visible manifestations, it is necessary to construct a mental hypothetical two-level construct, including multiple theoretically possible cause-and-effect relationships between specific external manifestations and their psychological causes, thus recreating several possible (and at the first stage of the psychodiagnostic process, still equally probable ) variants of the existing internal psychological picture. If the relationship between the external indicators of any mental act and its internal psychological nature were mirror-image, then, as noted

S. L. Rubinstein, psychological knowledge would be superfluous. In reality, there is ambiguity in this relationship. Therefore, taking into account the probabilistic nature of causal connections between external manifestations and existing internal conditions, there should indeed be several possible, theoretically justified options for the internal picture. The more there are, the greater the likelihood that the hypothetical causes of this particular psychological phenomenon will include the cause that actually caused it.

The identification of an objectively established internal psychological picture of the phenomenon being studied, the determination of the one and only relationship that actually takes place in this particular case between the observed external manifestations and their internal causes, is possible only through the practice of using psychodiagnostic tools, with the help of which hypothetical verticals from externally observable behavioral indicators to their presumed causes. During this process, hypothetically possible relationships, but in this particular case that do not exist, are discarded, and as a result, an objectively established connection remains between these external behavioral manifestations and the internal structural organization of the mental processes that support them.

It is important to clearly understand that numerous observed indicators of behavior and activity may be different, outwardly unrelated manifestations of the same features of psychological processes and qualities. As a rule, the randomness and episodic nature of these manifestations is only apparent. In fact, these are links of one chain; there is an internal connection between them, which cannot be understood by considering these manifestations separately, on their own, which leads to their different interpretations (S. L. Rubinstein). Only by combining these manifestations into a certain system of cause-and-effect relationships in which this phenomenon is included and within the framework of which it is realized, is it possible, through theoretical reflection, to establish the internal psychological characteristics that are the direct cause of these various external manifestations.

Approaches to diagnosing and correcting school failure

Based on the data available in the psychological and pedagogical literature, we can say that currently in the practice of schooling there are several approaches to diagnosing and correcting the causes that cause certain difficulties in schooling: pedagogical(earliest) and later – psychological And neuropsychological(Fig. 1).

Rice. 1. Schematic representation of the content of different approaches to diagnosing and correcting school difficulties

1. Pedagogical approach. This approach to diagnosing and correcting school difficulties is based on the idea that all students should equally successfully master the curriculum offered to them, created in strict accordance with their age capabilities and existing level of knowledge. Otherwise, the teacher believes that the student either does not want to learn, is lazy, does not try, or does not understand the material. It follows that the student must either be forced to do what is required, or the material he does not understand must be explained again. During diagnosis, the teacher, based on an analysis of the products of the student’s educational activity (operative psychodiagnostics), identifies gaps in his knowledge, that is, shortcomings in the student’s mastery of this or that material. The teacher’s corrective actions consist of repeated (sometimes multiple) explanations of the educational material and the student performing training exercises, again based on the educational material. Essentially, this method of overcoming educational difficulties is “coaching” the student to complete educational tasks. Diagnosis and correction of difficulties remain within this one level.

2. Psychological approach. This approach to diagnosing and correcting school difficulties is generally based on the idea of ​​polycausal conditionality of school failure and considers, first of all, shortcomings in the cognitive and personal development of students as specific causes of educational difficulties. This approach systematically combines two levels of existence of any mental phenomenon: the level of its external manifestation (pedagogical) and the level of internal psychological processes (psychological).

Diagnostics within the framework of the psychological approach is carried out based on the results of an analysis of all possible relationships between specific external manifestations of difficulties and their psychological causes. Here, with the help of psychodiagnostic tools, insufficiency in the development of certain cognitive processes or characteristics of the personal sphere is established. Then, with the help of a system of psychological tasks, targeted correctional and developmental influences are carried out on the identified causes of the analyzed difficulties, the result of which is their elimination.

3. Neuropsychological approach. This approach to diagnosing and correcting school difficulties is that the latter are considered as a result of deficiency (insufficiency) of the development of individual brain structures. Essentially, it remains within the framework of monocausal (one-cause) attribution of school failure to the influence of minimal brain dysfunctions, although the role of emotional and motivational factors is recognized, as well as the influence of the social situation of development. This diagnostic approach is associated with identifying, using a system of psychological tasks addressed to certain brain structures, those whose level of development is currently insufficient, which causes the emergence of a number of cognitive difficulties in school education. The same system of psychological tasks is used at the correctional and developmental stage, the purpose of which is to activate and stimulate the development of deficient brain structures.

Assessing the effectiveness of these approaches in terms of identifying the causes of schoolchildren's learning difficulties, it should be noted that the effectiveness of the pedagogical approach in general is extremely low. The exception is cases when a student, due to a number of external circumstances (for example, illness), was absent from class and could not hear the teacher’s explanation of new material, but was unable to understand it on his own. Then it is the pedagogical approach that may be the most adequate for overcoming the difficulties encountered by the student. The neuropsychological approach, which in principle coincides with the psychological approach, can be considered quite effective, if you still do not strive to directly link the external manifestations of all school difficulties with deficiencies in the development of specific brain structures. However, in our opinion, the most effective is the psychological approach, both from the point of view of its theoretical validity and from the point of view of practical effectiveness in overcoming school difficulties for students.

Texts for self-study

Rubinstein S. L. Fundamentals of general psychology

The unity between consciousness and activity... creates the basis for objective knowledge of the psyche: the assertion of subjective idealistic psychology about the unknowability of someone else’s psyche and the assertion of opponents of psychology about the subjectivity, that is, unscientificness, of all psychological knowledge falls; psyche, consciousness can become the subject of objective knowledge.

This unity is the basis of truly scientific objective knowledge of the psyche. It opens up the possibility of moving toward knowledge of the inner content of a person, her experiences, her consciousness, based on the external data of her behavior, from her deeds and actions. It makes it possible, as it were, to shine through the external manifestations of a person, through his actions and actions, his consciousness, thereby illuminating the psychological characteristics of his behavior. Human activity, as K. Marx wrote about industrial activity, is “the open book of human essential forces, sensually presented to us as human psychology"(Marx K., Engels F. – Works. T. 42. – P. 123).

The unity of consciousness and behavior, however, is not identity; We are not talking about the automatic coincidence of a person’s external and internal manifestations. People's actions in relation to the environment do not always directly correspond to the feelings that they have for them: while a person acts, various, sometimes contradictory, feelings usually intersect within him. Outwardly different and even opposite actions can express the same character traits in relation to different conditions of a particular situation and stem from the same tendencies or attitudes of the individual. Conversely: outwardly homogeneous and seemingly identical actions can be performed for the most heterogeneous motives, expressing completely heterogeneous character traits and attitudes or tendencies of the individual. One person can commit the same act in order to help someone, and another - in order to curry favor with someone. The same character trait, shyness, for example, can in one case manifest itself in embarrassment, confusion, in another - in excessive noisiness and seemingly swaggering behavior, which covers up the same embarrassment. This very embarrassment and shyness is often generated by a disproportion in some cases between the aspirations of a person and his abilities, in others - between his abilities and achievements, and many other very diverse and even opposing reasons. Therefore, one who cannot reveal behind external behavior the properties of a person, his orientation and the motives from which his behavior proceeds will not understand anything in human behavior. There are random actions that are uncharacteristic of a person, and not every situation is able to adequately reveal the inner appearance of a person (therefore, artists are faced with a special compositional task - to find a specific situation for each character that is able to reveal this particular character). The immediate data of behavior can be just as deceptive as the immediate data of consciousness, self-awareness, and introspection. They require an interpretation that starts from the external data of behavior as starting points, but does not stop at them as something final and self-sufficient. A separate act of behavior, taken in isolation, as if taken out of context, usually allows for very different interpretations. Its internal content and true meaning are usually revealed only on the basis of a more or less extensive context of human life and activity - just as the meaning of a phrase is often revealed only from the context of speech, and is not uniquely determined by the dictionary meaning of its constituent words alone. Thus, between the internal and external manifestations of a person, between his consciousness and behavior, there is always a connection, due to which the internal psychological nature of an act of activity also affects its external course. However, this relationship between them is not mirror-image; their unity is not an automatic coincidence; it is not always adequate. If this relationship between the internal psychological nature of an act and its external course did not exist at all, objective psychological knowledge would be impossible; if it were always adequate, mirror-like, so that every accomplished act did not require any interpretation to qualify its inner nature, psychological knowledge would be unnecessary. But this relationship exists, and it is not unique, not mirror-like; Therefore, psychological knowledge is both possible and necessary.

Test questions and assignments

1. Describe the psychological and neuropsychological approaches to diagnosing and correcting school difficulties.

2. In what cases can a pedagogical approach to overcoming school difficulties be effective?

3. How did S. L. Rubinstein characterize the relationship between consciousness and activity?

4. Reveal the essence of one-to-one and multiple-valued relationships between the external manifestations of learning difficulties and their causes.

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The given introductory fragment of the book School failure: causes, psychocorrection, psychoprophylaxis (N. P. Lokalova, 2009) provided by our book partner -

Preface

This textbook is written based on materials from a course of lectures included in the training system for practical educational psychologists. Its central problem is the various causes of school failure. Their analysis, a systematic and comprehensive consideration of the factors of children's development and the conditions for organizing the school learning process, leading to the occurrence of learning delays, constitute the main content of the manual.

The main objective of the manual is to systematize knowledge about the factors influencing the success of school education, about the causes of various kinds of difficulties that arise in learning and manifest themselves in low academic results of schoolchildren, about ways to identify the causes of difficulties in learning, their psychological correction and the main directions of psychoprevention of school failure .

The material in the manual is presented on the basis of a genetic approach to the consideration of school difficulties and is aimed at revealing the cause-and-effect relationships between internal, psychological factors leading to various kinds of learning difficulties, and the external manifestations of these difficulties. The book substantiates the need for targeted cognitive correctional and formative influences in eliminating the psychological causes that cause school failure.

The problem of school failure is so complex and multifaceted that its comprehensive consideration requires a holistic synthetic approach that integrates knowledge from various fields of psychological science - general psychology, developmental and educational psychology, psychodiagnostics.

The manual examines a wide range of issues related to the causes of school failure at various stages of school ontogenesis - from the reasons that give rise to the failure of educational activities

V primary grades due to shortcomings in the upbringing and development of children in the preschool period, to factors influencing academic failure

V adolescence and high school age. Particular attention in the manual is paid to psychodiagnostics of the causes of academic failure, as well as ways and means of its psychoprophylaxis.

The material of the manual is presented in the introduction and four sections, divided into 15 topics, each of which is presented, although concisely, but in sufficient volume for general orientation on this issue. At the beginning of each topic, its content is reported and a list of concepts and their definitions that are necessary to master the material of this topic is provided. At the end of some topics, where possible and necessary, there is a list of experimental techniques that should be mastered for psychodiagnostics of the current level of development of the mental phenomena considered in this topic.

The structure of the textbook implements the principle of systemic differentiation: from a general description of the problem of academic failure and the factors and conditions that cause it, to a detailed consideration of the possible causes of specific difficulties in teaching basic academic subjects - the Russian language, reading and mathematics.

A specific feature of this textbook is that it is a textbook, since it includes quite large fragments of original works by famous psychologists and teachers, one way or another covering the issues of school failure under consideration. Reading these works in the context of the problems being studied will make it possible to clarify some details or more specific issues that are not always possible to consider in detail in a lecture course.

According to our deep conviction, formed as a result of many years of analysis and comprehension of the problem of psychological factors of school failure, the main reason for almost all school difficulties of children, to which, with a consistent and detailed examination, almost without exception, the whole variety of their external manifestations can be reduced, is the insufficient level of cognitive development spheres of students, and first of all - the low level of development of their analytical and synthetic activities in general. That is why, when considering issues related to the psychoprevention of school failure, we place special emphasis on the cognitive development of students of all school ages.

Introduction

Weak children are not ugly, but the most fragile, most delicate flowers

in the infinitely diverse flower garden of humanity.

V. A. Sukhomlinsky

Subject and objectives of the course.

Specifics of psychodiagnostics in school psychological services.

The ambiguity of the relationship between the external manifestations of learning difficulties and the reasons that cause them.

Approaches to diagnosing and correcting school difficulties.

Basic Concepts to Understand

Long-term psychodiagnostics - identification of deficiencies in educational activities and behavior over a fairly long period of time.

Underachieving schoolchildren- schoolchildren whose educational results are much lower than the requirements of the educational process.

Education is a system of scientific knowledge, skills and abilities, the mastery of which ensures the comprehensive development of mental and physical abilities of schoolchildren, the formation of their worldview, morality and behavior, preparation for social life and work.

Training is a process of active interaction between the teacher and the student, as a result of which the student develops certain knowledge and skills based on his own activity; joint activity of student and teacher, ensuring the assimilation of knowledge by schoolchildren and mastering the methods of acquiring knowledge.

Operational psychodiagnostics- identifying the causes of shortcomings and difficulties in educational activities and behavior based on the analysis of oral and written answers and the student’s actions.

Pedagogical diagnostics and correction - identifying the causes of failure to assimilate knowledge and difficulties in educational activities based on observation data and analysis of the products of schoolchildren’s activities and eliminating them by influencing externally observable shortcomings.

This textbook is written based on materials from a course of lectures included in the training system for practical educational psychologists. Its central problem is the various causes of school failure. Their analysis, a systematic and comprehensive consideration of the factors of children's development and the conditions for organizing the school learning process, leading to the occurrence of learning delays, constitute the main content of the manual.

The main objective of the manual is to systematize knowledge about the factors influencing the success of school education, about the causes of various kinds of difficulties that arise in learning and manifest themselves in low academic results of schoolchildren, about ways to identify the causes of difficulties in learning, their psychological correction and the main directions of psychoprevention of school failure .

The material in the manual is presented on the basis of a genetic approach to the consideration of school difficulties and is aimed at revealing the cause-and-effect relationships between internal, psychological factors leading to various kinds of learning difficulties, and the external manifestations of these difficulties. The book substantiates the need for targeted cognitive correctional and formative influences in eliminating the psychological causes that cause school failure.

The problem of school failure is so complex and multifaceted that its comprehensive consideration requires a holistic synthetic approach that integrates knowledge from various fields of psychological science - general psychology, developmental and educational psychology, psychodiagnostics.

The manual examines a wide range of issues related to the causes of school failure at various stages of school ontogenesis - from the reasons that give rise to the failure of educational activities in the primary grades due to shortcomings in the upbringing and development of children in the preschool period, to factors influencing failure in adolescence and older school age. Particular attention in the manual is paid to psychodiagnostics of the causes of academic failure, as well as ways and means of its psychoprophylaxis.

The material of the manual is presented in the introduction and four sections, divided into 15 topics, each of which is presented, although concisely, but in sufficient volume for general orientation on this issue. At the beginning of each topic, its content is reported and a list of concepts and their definitions that are necessary to master the material of this topic is provided. At the end of some topics, where possible and necessary, there is a list of experimental techniques that should be mastered for psychodiagnostics of the current level of development of the mental phenomena considered in this topic.

The structure of the textbook implements the principle of systemic differentiation: from a general description of the problem of academic failure and the factors and conditions that cause it, to a detailed consideration of the possible causes of specific difficulties in teaching basic academic subjects - the Russian language, reading and mathematics.

A specific feature of this textbook is that it is a textbook, since it includes quite large fragments of original works by famous psychologists and teachers, one way or another covering the issues of school failure under consideration.

Reading these works in the context of the problems being studied will make it possible to clarify some details or more specific issues that are not always possible to consider in detail in a lecture course.

According to our deep conviction, formed as a result of many years of analysis and comprehension of the problem of psychological factors of school failure, the main reason for almost all school difficulties of children, to which, with a consistent and detailed examination, almost without exception, the whole variety of their external manifestations can be reduced, is the insufficient level of cognitive development spheres of students, and, first of all, the low level of development of their analytical and synthetic activity in general. That is why, when considering issues related to the psychoprevention of school failure, we place special emphasis on the cognitive development of students of all school ages.

Introduction

Weak children are not ugly, but the most fragile, most delicate flowers in the infinitely diverse flower garden of humanity.

V. A. Sukhomlinsky

Subject and objectives of the course.

Specifics of psychodiagnostics in school psychological services.

The ambiguity of the relationship between the external manifestations of learning difficulties and the reasons that cause them.

Approaches to diagnosing and correcting school difficulties.

Basic Concepts to Understand

Long-term psychodiagnostics– identification of deficiencies in educational activities and behavior over a sufficiently long period of time.

Underachieving schoolchildren– schoolchildren whose educational results are much lower than the requirements of the educational process.

Education– a system of scientific knowledge, abilities and skills, the mastery of which ensures the comprehensive development of mental and physical abilities of schoolchildren, the formation of their worldview, morality and behavior, preparation for social life and work.

Education– the process of active interaction between the teacher and the student, as a result of which the student develops certain knowledge and skills based on his own activity; joint activity of student and teacher, ensuring the assimilation of knowledge by schoolchildren and mastering the methods of acquiring knowledge.

Operational psychodiagnostics– identifying the causes of shortcomings and difficulties in educational activities and behavior based on the analysis of oral and written answers and the student’s actions.

Pedagogical diagnostics and correction– identifying the causes of failure to assimilate knowledge and difficulties in educational activities based on observation data and analysis of the products of schoolchildren’s activities and eliminating them by influencing externally observable shortcomings.

Polycausal conditionality of school failure– a multiplicity of various external and internal factors that negatively affect the quality of the process of knowledge acquisition.

Psychological diagnostics– a type of cognitive activity of a psychologist aimed at clarifying the essence of individual psychological characteristics of a person in order to assess their current state and develop recommendations.

Psychological correction– the focus of psychological influences on specific psychological structures in order to change certain psychological indicators for the full development and functioning of the individual.

Learning difficulties– subjective experience of a discrepancy between the requirements of educational activities and the intellectual capabilities of the student.

Educational activities– specific human activity aimed at mastering certain knowledge, skills, behaviors and types of activities.

School failure– discrepancy between the student’s educational achievements and the requirements of the school curriculum.

This training course is devoted to the school problems of children, various reasons (psychological, pedagogical, psychophysiological) of the difficulties that many schoolchildren experience when studying at school. The subject of the course is the psychological causes of school failure and ways to eliminate them. The objective of the course is to study the internal and external factors that determine the emergence of various kinds of difficulties in learning and the formation of an “alloy” of psychological knowledge and the ability to use it in practice.

The importance of the school period in a person’s life cannot be overestimated. Much in a person’s life depends on how it develops - successfully or unsuccessfully, including many personal qualities that are formed under the influence and as a result of certain features of the school period of a person’s life. Many of an adult's problems can be better understood by looking back to his years in school. The point is not even whether a person studied successfully or unsuccessfully, but how comfortable he felt at school, whether he wanted to go to school every day, how his relationships with teachers and classmates developed. It is under the influence of these circumstances that certain personal qualities are formed. In many ways, this depends not so much on the student himself, but on what the school process itself is like, how it is organized, and how society sees the goals and objectives of schooling.

What are the objectives of education in general and schooling in particular?

In modern conditions, the tasks of education are changing: they no longer come down to the transfer of ready-made knowledge and arming with solutions for all occasions, but to the formation of the ability to quickly and fully navigate in constantly changing circumstances. Today, a modern person is capable of adapting to the conditions of life around him. Education as a whole should be aimed at acquiring precisely this skill.

Mastering knowledge in the process of school education with all clarity and distinctness should act not as a goal, but as a means of developing the personality of schoolchildren. The main task of school education is to form in children such a psychological mechanism that would allow them to further carry out the process of self-realization, self-development, so that the cognitive need of schoolchildren does not fade away once and for all while still at school, so that it drives them in the future and in adulthood. Throughout life, a person would retain a thirst for knowledge and would receive satisfaction from it. “The student,” wrote K. D. Ushinsky, “is not a vessel that needs to be filled, but a torch that needs to be lit.”

However, in primary school, learning skills are much more important than knowledge itself. Of course, the ability to read well entails knowledge, but what is most important is the skills themselves - reading, writing, speaking, counting. The main goal of primary school is to develop these study skills. Children who have low levels of development fail in school and lose the chance to succeed in life.

We are all different in our abilities, character, worldview, physiological and mental properties. Some are smart, others are not very smart, some are hardworking, others are lazy, some are talented, others are untalented, some are purposeful, others are scattered and uncollected. There is no equality in nature. Previously, individuality was considered a great sin, because the individual was nothing in front of the collective. Now we understand that without bright, talented, thinking individuals there cannot be a highly developed society. School plays a very significant role in the formation of such individuals, and its importance cannot be overestimated. Of course, for the formation of a person as a whole, it is important how successful he was in learning. But even more important is how he felt at school, how comfortable he was in his relationships with teachers and classmates.

It is generally accepted that an external indicator of a child’s school well-being is his academic performance, but not all children can achieve “good” or “excellent” grades. However, everyone should feel comfortable at school and not feel embarrassed because of failures in their studies. Therefore, the task of a school psychologist is to create an atmosphere at school that is conducive to the development of the personality of each student, the formation of self-esteem, self-respect, significance, and the uniqueness of his personality. This is largely hampered by the failure of schoolchildren in learning, which, if help is not provided in time, affects the quality of knowledge acquisition and the formation of negative personal qualities - conformism, deceit, opportunism, negative attitude towards work, lack of self-confidence, low self-esteem.

It is known that from 15 to 40% of primary school students experience various difficulties in the process of schooling. But it is precisely the requirement to study well, even when the child’s abilities cannot meet this requirement of adults, that leads to problems for him. The main indicator of success in school is the grades a student receives in class. It is towards getting a good grade (at any cost) that teachers and parents orient the child. Therefore, it is not surprising that schoolchildren see the meaning of their teaching in it. A pursuit of marks appears, which ultimately deforms the child’s personality.

“I have always thought with great concern about the psychosis of the pursuit of excellent grades - this psychosis is born in the family and captures teachers, places a heavy burden on the young souls of schoolchildren, cripples them. At this time, the child does not have such abilities to study excellently, and his parents demand only A’s from him, in extreme cases, they put up with B’s, and the unfortunate student, receiving C’s, feels almost like a criminal.” (Sukhomlinsky V.A., 1969b. – P. 103.)

An increasing number of teachers are realizing that students are not a homogeneous mass, but that each student is an individual, unique, unique and unrepeatable, characterized by his own individual psychological characteristics, abilities, and needs. There comes an understanding that all students cannot master the material in the same way due to these characteristics and there is no need to make the same demands on everyone: what is bad for one is good for another. This state of affairs led, ultimately, to the emergence of a special direction in the activities of psychologists - school psychodiagnostics, aimed at understanding the individual psychological characteristics of schoolchildren in order to identify the causes of various kinds of difficulties in the educational activities of students of different ages, to overcome and prevent deviations in the intellectual and personal development of schoolchildren.

The specificity of psychodiagnostics in school psychological services is that its main task is to identify the level of development in students of certain personality substructures (cognitive, motivational, emotional, volitional), in order not only to anticipate the occurrence of certain educational difficulties in them, but and carry out psychological correction of developmental deficiencies.

School psychodiagnostics plays an important role in preventing and overcoming school failure in students. The task of the educational process is not only the assimilation of a knowledge system, but also ensuring a high level of mental development of schoolchildren and their mental development in general. Therefore, it is important to monitor how this mental development is carried out, what difficulties students have in the process of mastering knowledge, and the timely elimination of those factors that lead to learning difficulties and, consequently, to a decrease in school performance. Essentially, this is control over the quality of the educational process.

However, traditionally, the effectiveness of the educational process is determined by what schoolchildren know and can do. This is important, but not enough, since it remains unclear to what extent the learned material becomes the property of the student’s personality, which allowed the assimilation of this or that educational material for the further development of the student’s thinking, abilities, and beliefs. In other words, it remains unclear how effective the educational process itself is.

The teacher does not always have the opportunity to promptly identify the causes of various kinds of difficulties in educational work with students of different ages, overcome deviations in the intellectual and personal development of schoolchildren, and provide psychological assistance in resolving conflict situations. At the same time, the teacher’s conduct of operational and long-term psychodiagnostics is one of the important aspects of his professional activity. Most often in his psychodiagnostic activities, the teacher uses an intuitive-empirical approach, which consists in the fact that the teacher, relying only on his experience and intuition, often assesses the student’s problems, his educational difficulties without sufficient information about the student, without understanding the true motives of his actions and actions, using mainly their impressions of the child. According to our data, the unreliability of this approach is manifested in the fact that approximately 60% of teachers, based only on their experience and knowledge of the student, indicated the reasons for students’ difficulties incorrectly, about 30% of teachers identified them incompletely or partially incorrectly, and only 10% of respondents teachers correctly understood the reasons for the occurrence of certain difficulties among students. This confirms the idea that “by eye”, without using psychodiagnostic techniques and methods, it is almost impossible to understand the psychological causes of certain difficulties in the educational activities of schoolchildren, and, consequently, to carry out effective correctional work.

However, a significant difficulty arises here. The fact is that there is no direct and unambiguous correspondence between the visible manifestations of difficulties and their psychological causes. It is quite likely that the same external manifestation of difficulties has different psychological causes in different students, and it is also possible that learning difficulties that differ in external manifestations in different students have at their core the same cause.

In this regard, it should be said about the most important thing that determines success in identifying the causes of various kinds of schoolchildren’s learning difficulties. It consists in the ability to understand the nature of the reasons that determine the appearance of certain difficulties of the student. The fact is that, when dealing with observable symptoms and external behavioral indicators, it is necessary, based on their study, comparison, interpretation, to make a judgment about some psychological phenomenon, its causes that are not amenable to direct perception. Even L. S. Vygotsky and S. L. Rubinstein noted the following:

The absence of a direct, mirror coincidence of the essence of things with its manifestation and the existence, at the same time, of unity between the internal and external;

The impossibility of automatically establishing the real cause of a particular phenomenon solely on the basis of studying externally observable manifestations. To penetrate into the inner essence of mental processes, mental processing of external, behavioral data is necessary, taking into account their systemic connection with psychological processes occurring at a level hidden from direct observation.

Guided by these provisions and using the results of the analysis of visible manifestations, it is necessary to construct a mental hypothetical two-level construct, including multiple theoretically possible cause-and-effect relationships between specific external manifestations and their psychological causes, thus recreating several possible (and at the first stage of the psychodiagnostic process, still equally probable ) variants of the existing internal psychological picture. If the relationship between the external indicators of any mental act and its internal psychological nature were mirror-image, then, as noted

S. L. Rubinstein, psychological knowledge would be superfluous. In reality, there is ambiguity in this relationship. Therefore, taking into account the probabilistic nature of causal connections between external manifestations and existing internal conditions, there should indeed be several possible, theoretically justified options for the internal picture. The more there are, the greater the likelihood that the hypothetical causes of this particular psychological phenomenon will include the cause that actually caused it.

The identification of an objectively established internal psychological picture of the phenomenon being studied, the determination of the one and only relationship that actually takes place in this particular case between the observed external manifestations and their internal causes, is possible only through the practice of using psychodiagnostic tools, with the help of which hypothetical verticals from externally observable behavioral indicators to their presumed causes. During this process, hypothetically possible relationships, but in this particular case that do not exist, are discarded, and as a result, an objectively established connection remains between these external behavioral manifestations and the internal structural organization of the mental processes that support them.

It is important to clearly understand that numerous observed indicators of behavior and activity may be different, outwardly unrelated manifestations of the same features of psychological processes and qualities. As a rule, the randomness and episodic nature of these manifestations is only apparent. In fact, these are links of one chain; there is an internal connection between them, which cannot be understood by considering these manifestations separately, on their own, which leads to their different interpretations (S. L. Rubinstein). Only by combining these manifestations into a certain system of cause-and-effect relationships in which this phenomenon is included and within the framework of which it is realized, is it possible, through theoretical reflection, to establish the internal psychological characteristics that are the direct cause of these various external manifestations.

Preface

This textbook is written based on materials from a course of lectures included in the training system for practical educational psychologists. Its central problem is the various causes of school failure. Their analysis, a systematic and comprehensive consideration of the factors of children's development and the conditions for organizing the school learning process, leading to the occurrence of learning delays, constitute the main content of the manual.

The main objective of the manual is to systematize knowledge about the factors influencing the success of school education, about the causes of various kinds of difficulties that arise in learning and manifest themselves in low academic results of schoolchildren, about ways to identify the causes of difficulties in learning, their psychological correction and the main directions of psychoprevention of school failure .

The material in the manual is presented on the basis of a genetic approach to the consideration of school difficulties and is aimed at revealing the cause-and-effect relationships between internal, psychological factors leading to various kinds of learning difficulties, and the external manifestations of these difficulties. The book substantiates the need for targeted cognitive correctional and formative influences in eliminating the psychological causes that cause school failure.

The problem of school failure is so complex and multifaceted that its comprehensive consideration requires a holistic synthetic approach that integrates knowledge from various fields of psychological science - general psychology, developmental and educational psychology, psychodiagnostics.

The manual examines a wide range of issues related to the causes of school failure at various stages of school ontogenesis - from the reasons that give rise to the failure of educational activities in the primary grades due to shortcomings in the upbringing and development of children in the preschool period, to factors influencing failure in adolescence and older school age. Particular attention in the manual is paid to psychodiagnostics of the causes of academic failure, as well as ways and means of its psychoprophylaxis.

The material of the manual is presented in the introduction and four sections, divided into 15 topics, each of which is presented, although concisely, but in sufficient volume for general orientation on this issue. At the beginning of each topic, its content is reported and a list of concepts and their definitions that are necessary to master the material of this topic is provided. At the end of some topics, where possible and necessary, there is a list of experimental techniques that should be mastered for psychodiagnostics of the current level of development of the mental phenomena considered in this topic.

The structure of the textbook implements the principle of systemic differentiation: from a general description of the problem of academic failure and the factors and conditions that cause it, to a detailed consideration of the possible causes of specific difficulties in teaching basic academic subjects - the Russian language, reading and mathematics.

A specific feature of this textbook is that it is a textbook, since it includes quite large fragments of original works by famous psychologists and teachers, one way or another covering the issues of school failure under consideration. Reading these works in the context of the problems being studied will make it possible to clarify some details or more specific issues that are not always possible to consider in detail in a lecture course.

According to our deep conviction, formed as a result of many years of analysis and comprehension of the problem of psychological factors of school failure, the main reason for almost all school difficulties of children, to which, with a consistent and detailed examination, almost without exception, the whole variety of their external manifestations can be reduced, is the insufficient level of cognitive development spheres of students, and, first of all, the low level of development of their analytical and synthetic activity in general. That is why, when considering issues related to the psychoprevention of school failure, we place special emphasis on the cognitive development of students of all school ages.

Introduction

Weak children are not ugly, but the most fragile, most delicate flowers in the infinitely diverse flower garden of humanity.

V. A. Sukhomlinsky

Subject and objectives of the course.

Specifics of psychodiagnostics in school psychological services.

The ambiguity of the relationship between the external manifestations of learning difficulties and the reasons that cause them.

Approaches to diagnosing and correcting school difficulties.

Basic Concepts to Understand

Long-term psychodiagnostics– identification of deficiencies in educational activities and behavior over a sufficiently long period of time.

Underachieving schoolchildren– schoolchildren whose educational results are much lower than the requirements of the educational process.

Education– a system of scientific knowledge, abilities and skills, the mastery of which ensures the comprehensive development of mental and physical abilities of schoolchildren, the formation of their worldview, morality and behavior, preparation for social life and work.

Education– the process of active interaction between the teacher and the student, as a result of which the student develops certain knowledge and skills based on his own activity; joint activity of student and teacher, ensuring the assimilation of knowledge by schoolchildren and mastering the methods of acquiring knowledge.

Operational psychodiagnostics– identifying the causes of shortcomings and difficulties in educational activities and behavior based on the analysis of oral and written answers and the student’s actions.

Pedagogical diagnostics and correction– identifying the causes of failure to assimilate knowledge and difficulties in educational activities based on observation data and analysis of the products of schoolchildren’s activities and eliminating them by influencing externally observable shortcomings.

Polycausal conditionality of school failure– a multiplicity of various external and internal factors that negatively affect the quality of the process of knowledge acquisition.

Psychological diagnostics– a type of cognitive activity of a psychologist aimed at clarifying the essence of individual psychological characteristics of a person in order to assess their current state and develop recommendations.

Psychological correction– the focus of psychological influences on specific psychological structures in order to change certain psychological indicators for the full development and functioning of the individual.

Learning difficulties– subjective experience of a discrepancy between the requirements of educational activities and the intellectual capabilities of the student.

Educational activities– specific human activity aimed at mastering certain knowledge, skills, behaviors and types of activities.

School failure– discrepancy between the student’s educational achievements and the requirements of the school curriculum.

This training course is devoted to the school problems of children, various reasons (psychological, pedagogical, psychophysiological) of the difficulties that many schoolchildren experience when studying at school. The subject of the course is the psychological causes of school failure and ways to eliminate them. The objective of the course is to study the internal and external factors that determine the emergence of various kinds of difficulties in learning and the formation of an “alloy” of psychological knowledge and the ability to use it in practice.

The importance of the school period in a person’s life cannot be overestimated. Much in a person’s life depends on how it develops - successfully or unsuccessfully, including many personal qualities that are formed under the influence and as a result of certain features of the school period of a person’s life. Many of an adult's problems can be better understood by looking back to his years in school. The point is not even whether a person studied successfully or unsuccessfully, but how comfortable he felt at school, whether he wanted to go to school every day, how his relationships with teachers and classmates developed. It is under the influence of these circumstances that certain personal qualities are formed. In many ways, this depends not so much on the student himself, but on what the school process itself is like, how it is organized, and how society sees the goals and objectives of schooling.

What are the objectives of education in general and schooling in particular?

In modern conditions, the tasks of education are changing: they no longer come down to the transfer of ready-made knowledge and arming with solutions for all occasions, but to the formation of the ability to quickly and fully navigate in constantly changing circumstances. Today, a modern person is capable of adapting to the conditions of life around him. Education as a whole should be aimed at acquiring precisely this skill.

Mastering knowledge in the process of school education with all clarity and distinctness should act not as a goal, but as a means of developing the personality of schoolchildren. The main task of school education is to form in children such a psychological mechanism that would allow them to further carry out the process of self-realization, self-development, so that the cognitive need of schoolchildren does not fade away once and for all while still at school, so that it drives them in the future and in adulthood. Throughout life, a person would retain a thirst for knowledge and would receive satisfaction from it. “The student,” wrote K. D. Ushinsky, “is not a vessel that needs to be filled, but a torch that needs to be lit.”

However, in primary school, learning skills are much more important than knowledge itself. Of course, the ability to read well entails knowledge, but what is most important is the skills themselves - reading, writing, speaking, counting. The main goal of primary school is to develop these study skills. Children who have low levels of development fail in school and lose the chance to succeed in life.

We are all different in our abilities, character, worldview, physiological and mental properties. Some are smart, others are not very smart, some are hardworking, others are lazy, some are talented, others are untalented, some are purposeful, others are scattered and uncollected. There is no equality in nature. Previously, individuality was considered a great sin, because the individual was nothing in front of the collective. Now we understand that without bright, talented, thinking individuals there cannot be a highly developed society. School plays a very significant role in the formation of such individuals, and its importance cannot be overestimated. Of course, for the formation of a person as a whole, it is important how successful he was in learning. But even more important is how he felt at school, how comfortable he was in his relationships with teachers and classmates.

It is generally accepted that an external indicator of a child’s school well-being is his academic performance, but not all children can achieve “good” or “excellent” grades. However, everyone should feel comfortable at school and not feel embarrassed because of failures in their studies. Therefore, the task of a school psychologist is to create an atmosphere at school that is conducive to the development of the personality of each student, the formation of self-esteem, self-respect, significance, and the uniqueness of his personality. This is largely hampered by the failure of schoolchildren in learning, which, if help is not provided in time, affects the quality of knowledge acquisition and the formation of negative personal qualities - conformism, deceit, opportunism, negative attitude towards work, lack of self-confidence, low self-esteem.

It is known that from 15 to 40% of primary school students experience various difficulties in the process of schooling. But it is precisely the requirement to study well, even when the child’s abilities cannot meet this requirement of adults, that leads to problems for him. The main indicator of success in school is the grades a student receives in class. It is towards getting a good grade (at any cost) that teachers and parents orient the child. Therefore, it is not surprising that schoolchildren see the meaning of their teaching in it. A pursuit of marks appears, which ultimately deforms the child’s personality.

“I have always thought with great concern about the psychosis of the pursuit of excellent grades - this psychosis is born in the family and captures teachers, places a heavy burden on the young souls of schoolchildren, cripples them. At this time, the child does not have such abilities to study excellently, and his parents demand only A’s from him, in extreme cases, they put up with B’s, and the unfortunate student, receiving C’s, feels almost like a criminal.” (Sukhomlinsky V.A., 1969b. – P. 103.)

An increasing number of teachers are realizing that students are not a homogeneous mass, but that each student is an individual, unique, unique and unrepeatable, characterized by his own individual psychological characteristics, abilities, and needs. There comes an understanding that all students cannot master the material in the same way due to these characteristics and there is no need to make the same demands on everyone: what is bad for one is good for another. This state of affairs led, ultimately, to the emergence of a special direction in the activities of psychologists - school psychodiagnostics, aimed at understanding the individual psychological characteristics of schoolchildren in order to identify the causes of various kinds of difficulties in the educational activities of students of different ages, to overcome and prevent deviations in the intellectual and personal development of schoolchildren.

The specificity of psychodiagnostics in school psychological services is that its main task is to identify the level of development in students of certain personality substructures (cognitive, motivational, emotional, volitional), in order not only to anticipate the occurrence of certain educational difficulties in them, but and carry out psychological correction of developmental deficiencies.

School psychodiagnostics plays an important role in preventing and overcoming school failure in students. The task of the educational process is not only the assimilation of a knowledge system, but also ensuring a high level of mental development of schoolchildren and their mental development in general. Therefore, it is important to monitor how this mental development is carried out, what difficulties students have in the process of mastering knowledge, and the timely elimination of those factors that lead to learning difficulties and, consequently, to a decrease in school performance. Essentially, this is control over the quality of the educational process.

However, traditionally, the effectiveness of the educational process is determined by what schoolchildren know and can do. This is important, but not enough, since it remains unclear to what extent the learned material becomes the property of the student’s personality, which allowed the assimilation of this or that educational material for the further development of the student’s thinking, abilities, and beliefs. In other words, it remains unclear how effective the educational process itself is.

The teacher does not always have the opportunity to promptly identify the causes of various kinds of difficulties in educational work with students of different ages, overcome deviations in the intellectual and personal development of schoolchildren, and provide psychological assistance in resolving conflict situations. At the same time, the teacher’s conduct of operational and long-term psychodiagnostics is one of the important aspects of his professional activity. Most often in his psychodiagnostic activities, the teacher uses an intuitive-empirical approach, which consists in the fact that the teacher, relying only on his experience and intuition, often assesses the student’s problems, his educational difficulties without sufficient information about the student, without understanding the true motives of his actions and actions, using mainly their impressions of the child. According to our data, the unreliability of this approach is manifested in the fact that approximately 60% of teachers, based only on their experience and knowledge of the student, indicated the reasons for students’ difficulties incorrectly, about 30% of teachers identified them incompletely or partially incorrectly, and only 10% of respondents teachers correctly understood the reasons for the occurrence of certain difficulties among students. This confirms the idea that “by eye”, without using psychodiagnostic techniques and methods, it is almost impossible to understand the psychological causes of certain difficulties in the educational activities of schoolchildren, and, consequently, to carry out effective correctional work.

However, a significant difficulty arises here. The fact is that there is no direct and unambiguous correspondence between the visible manifestations of difficulties and their psychological causes. It is quite likely that the same external manifestation of difficulties has different psychological causes in different students, and it is also possible that learning difficulties that differ in external manifestations in different students have at their core the same cause.

In this regard, it should be said about the most important thing that determines success in identifying the causes of various kinds of schoolchildren’s learning difficulties. It consists in the ability to understand the nature of the reasons that determine the appearance of certain difficulties of the student. The fact is that, when dealing with observable symptoms and external behavioral indicators, it is necessary, based on their study, comparison, interpretation, to make a judgment about some psychological phenomenon, its causes that are not amenable to direct perception. Even L. S. Vygotsky and S. L. Rubinstein noted the following:

The absence of a direct, mirror coincidence of the essence of things with its manifestation and the existence, at the same time, of unity between the internal and external;

The impossibility of automatically establishing the real cause of a particular phenomenon solely on the basis of studying externally observable manifestations. To penetrate into the inner essence of mental processes, mental processing of external, behavioral data is necessary, taking into account their systemic connection with psychological processes occurring at a level hidden from direct observation.

Guided by these provisions and using the results of the analysis of visible manifestations, it is necessary to construct a mental hypothetical two-level construct, including multiple theoretically possible cause-and-effect relationships between specific external manifestations and their psychological causes, thus recreating several possible (and at the first stage of the psychodiagnostic process, still equally probable ) variants of the existing internal psychological picture. If the relationship between the external indicators of any mental act and its internal psychological nature were mirror-image, then, as noted

S. L. Rubinstein, psychological knowledge would be superfluous. In reality, there is ambiguity in this relationship. Therefore, taking into account the probabilistic nature of causal connections between external manifestations and existing internal conditions, there should indeed be several possible, theoretically justified options for the internal picture. The more there are, the greater the likelihood that the hypothetical causes of this particular psychological phenomenon will include the cause that actually caused it.

The identification of an objectively established internal psychological picture of the phenomenon being studied, the determination of the one and only relationship that actually takes place in this particular case between the observed external manifestations and their internal causes, is possible only through the practice of using psychodiagnostic tools, with the help of which hypothetical verticals from externally observable behavioral indicators to their presumed causes. During this process, hypothetically possible relationships, but in this particular case that do not exist, are discarded, and as a result, an objectively established connection remains between these external behavioral manifestations and the internal structural organization of the mental processes that support them.

It is important to clearly understand that numerous observed indicators of behavior and activity may be different, outwardly unrelated manifestations of the same features of psychological processes and qualities. As a rule, the randomness and episodic nature of these manifestations is only apparent. In fact, these are links of one chain; there is an internal connection between them, which cannot be understood by considering these manifestations separately, on their own, which leads to their different interpretations (S. L. Rubinstein). Only by combining these manifestations into a certain system of cause-and-effect relationships in which this phenomenon is included and within the framework of which it is realized, is it possible, through theoretical reflection, to establish the internal psychological characteristics that are the direct cause of these various external manifestations.