Varvara I. Morosanova

Background. The role of conscious self-regulation in determining students’ psychological well-being and academic performance is considered in the context of the fundamental problem of the regularities of young adolescents’ development.

Objective. To reveal the role of meta-resources of conscious self-regulation in determining young adolescents' psychological well-being and academic performance.

Design. Sample: 500 students in 4th- to 6th grade (10-12) in general schools, 149 of whom participated in a three-year longitudinal study. The Self-Regulation Profile of Learning Activity and the Well-Being Manifestation scales were used.

Results. Conscious self-regulation and academic performance increase significantly in fifth grade and decrease in sixth grade. On the contrary, psychological well-being is characterized by a systemic positive dynamic. A typological analysis identified the levels of psychological well-being of students growing, stable, and declining during the transition period. It was found that the general level of conscious self-regulation made a significant positive contribution and is a universal resource for students' psychological well-being and academic performance. Special regulatory resources for academic performance are described, depending on the trajectory of changes in psychological well-being. Increased well-being is determined by the regulatory competencies of Planning and Evaluation of results and its stability by Planning, Modelling, Flexibility, and Responsibility. The general level of self-regulation, regulatory competencies, Planning, Programming and Responsibility mediate in the relationship between student psychological well-being and academic performance. A longitudinal study found that self-regulation has a long-term positive effect on student psychological well-being and academic performance.

Conclusion. Conscious self-regulation is a meta-resource that makes a significant contribution to both the psychological well-being and academic performance. Mediator and prognostic effects of self-regulation on these properties create a psychological basis for practical work.

Background. In a pandemic situation, the search for psychological resources for successful self-organization of life under the changing conditions becomes an urgent issue. Revealing the role of a person's conscious activity to achieve such self-organization during the lockdown period is the goal of this study.

Objective. Our main task was to monitor self-assessments of life self-organization in different age groups. Another was to evaluate the extent to which conscious self-regulation contributes to the success of self-organization, to overcoming its difficulties, and to accepting the uncertainty of the future.

Design. The data were obtained online on the Testograf platform (www.testograf.ru), which was provided by the all-Russian research project “Exploring at home!” (www.issleduemdoma.ru), a study which ran from late April to early June 2020. The sample was comprised of 1634 people, ages 18-60, from 69 regions of Russia. The methods were “Morosanova’s Self-regulation Profile Questionnaire – SRPQM 2020” and the authors’ ad hocquestionnaire “Self-organization of life during a lockdown.”

Results. The majority of respondents assessed their level of self-organization as medium (67.6%) and high (17.3%). The general level of self-regulation was associated with successful self-organization in all age groups. Regression analysis revealed that being able to cope with and accept uncertainty depended primarily on flexibility, persistence, planning goals, and modeling conditions. Overcoming the difficulties of self-organization depended on the same indicators, with additional contributions of reliability and programming of actions. Students demonstrated significantly lower levels of self-regulation than older people; as a result,  young people experienced more difficulties in organizing their lives under self-isolation conditions.

Conclusion. The higher the level of conscious self-regulation, the more productive a person is when self-organizing his/her behavior in case of a lockdown. The difficulties of self-organization, in turn, are associated with a low level of regulatory resources.

Background. Mastering a first language at school is mediated by the regulatory abilities of pupils. An open question is how the executive functions implementing conscious self-regulation are related to language competences.

Objective. To study the relationship between basic executive functions (switching, inhibition, working memory updating, and error correction) and language competences.

Design. A sample of 104 Russian middle school children (aged 13–15 years) performed three cognitive tasks assessing basic executive functions and two tasks assessing language competences in the areas of punctuation, spelling, morphology, syntax, semantics, vocabulary, and style.

Results. Inhibitionwas mostly related to punctuation, spelling, and morphology competences and was most important in the first competences task, requiring the recognition of errors. Switchingwas mostly related to the competences in syntax, reflecting the importance of switching attention between alternative syntactic structures. Working memory updatingwas the most important executive function related to language competences, with a heavy focus on higher-level lexical, semantic, and stylistic competences. The role of updating was especially important in the second competences task, which required generation of well-formed sentences. Error correctionwas mostly relevant for the recognition of language errors.

Conclusion. While inhibition and switching affect aspects of constructing the surface form of a sentence, working memory is preferentially related to the construction of semantically appropriate sentences. Error monitoring and correction are generally related to the recognition of language errors. Conscious self-regulation and its cognitive mechanisms are systematically related to the development of native language competences in middle school.

Background. The present research is carried out in the context of the conscious self-regulation of professional activity.

Objective. It investigates the regulatory and personality predictors of reliability in rescue operations under stressful conditions.

Design. The research sample includes 87 rescuers (72 men and 15 women aged from 25 to 50 years). Respondents were asked to complete the Morosanova’s Self-Regulation Profile Questionnaire – SRPQM, the Eysenck Personality Profile - Short (EPP-S), and the expert questionnaire “Professional Reliability of Rescue Operation” designed for this particular study.

Results. On the basis of a correlation analysis, the structural model of the predictors of action reliability was constructed using the maximum likelihood method. Consistency indices showed a good agreement between the model and empirical data. The model contains three latent factors: “Self-regulation”, “Neuroticism” and “Reliability of actions”. As the model displays, the “Self-regulation” factor is a significant predictor of professional action reliability. There are two indicator variables for the factor “Self-regulation”: the self-regulation reliability considered as its stability in the stressful situations, and the rescuers’ levels of development of professionally critical regulatory features - modeling of conditions significant for the achievement of goals and the programming of actions. The study results also show that personality dispositions (by Eysenck) have only indirect influence on action reliability. As the structural model reveals, the conscious self-regulation is a mediator in the relationship of neuroticism traits and action reliability.

Conclusion. The conscious self-regulation is a significant predictor of professional action reliability under stressful conditions. It is also the mediator of the effects of personality dispositions on the reliability of action.

Using the results of two empirical studies (with different samples and academic subjects), our research was aimed at discovering the significant role of conscious self-regulation, intelligence, and cognitive features in predicting optimal academic achievement. The sample consisted of 406 students (aged 14-16) in the 8th to 11th grades of the Russian formal education system. Conscious self-regulation together with intelligence and cognitive abilities was determined to be a significant predictor of academic success. The Study 1 results revealed that the general level of self-regulation of learning activity and certain regulatory features were significant predictors of different types of mathematical achievements: academic grades, scores on exams, mathematical fluency, as well as solving logical mathematical problems and equations. The present study is the first to show the mediating role of self-regulation in relation to intelligence, cognitive features, and academic success. Study 2 found evidence that conscious self-regulation and intelligence can predict academic achievement in the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences... At the same time, this determination has its peculiarities in particular variables of intelligence and certain self-regulation processes depending on the substantive characteristics of the academic subjects. Regression models of academic success in the humanities identified verbal intelligence associated with vocabulary as highly significant and a definitive requirement for success in these subjects. Study 1 and Study 2 showed that the only significant predictors of success in algebra and geometry were quantitative- relations intelligence and spatial intelligence. The implications of these findings for investigating predictors of academic achievement are discussed.

This research is devoted to the investigation of the role of conscious self-regulation in human development and activity. The concept of conscious self-regulation of a subject's voluntary activity and the history of its research conducted in Psychological Institute RAE are discussed. The results of the research dedicated to the typology of individual styles of self-regulation and their relationship with educational and professional activity effectiveness are presented. Personal dispositions have specific influence on the individual peculiarities of regulatory profile. It is concluded that the integrated system of individual self-regulation includes dynamic and content aspects of a personality, its conscious and subconscious structures for development and achievement of goals

Background. The theoretical basis of the study was the resource approach (Morosanova 2014, 2017), in which the conscious self-regulation of learning activity is understood as a meta-resource, of students allowing them to consciously and independently set learning goals and manage their achievement. This approach made it possible to create models of direct and mediate contributions of self-regulation and school engagement not only to the academic performance, but also to other motivational and personal competencies.

Objective. Our study is aimed to investigate the impact of conscious self-regulation, school engagement, motivation, and personality on academic achievement, while taking into account the effects of mediation.

Design. A quantitative research design was applied, using data collected from more than 1524 students from the 5^th to 11^th grades in Russian schools and applying Structural Equation Modelling (SEM).

Results. The results allowed us to construct a statistical model of predictors of students' academic achievement. The model was verified on the total sample, as well as samples differing in gender and age. The results show that conscious self-regulation is central to non-cognitive predictors of academic achievement. For the first time, a study has revealed and described the reciprocal relationship between self-regulation, academic motivation, school engagement, and academic performance. The resulting model demonstrates that behavioral and cognitive engagement make a significant contribution to academic performance, while emotional and social engagement do not find significant links with it, although they determine other areas of school life.

Conclusion. Our paper investigates the nature and strength of the effects of major non-cognitive predictors of academic achievement. The study results substantiated the resource role of conscious self-regulation not only for students’ academic performance, but also for their academic motivation, school engagement, and attitude toward learning. The predictor model of academic achievement we developed will provide a foundation for combining existing heterogeneous concepts into a single integrated model and clarify the contradictions between them.

Background. Recently, research on psychological well-being and its dynamics and predictors in adolescence, has gained special attention, due to the importance of well-being for mental and physical health, as well as for success in different activities. Self-regulation (SR) is considered a significant resource for maintaining psychological and school-related subjective well-being.

Objective. The purpose of our study was to identify the role of conscious SR in maintaining pupils' satisfaction with school life, and to assess the contribution of conscious SR to the development of psychological well-being in adolescence.

Design. Two three-year longitudinal studies were carried out on samples of young adolescents in Russian schools (N = 148; N = 132; 10-13 years). The studies utilized methods for assessing conscious SR, psychological well-being (PWB), and school-related subjective well-being (SWB), the latter being the cognitive component of life satisfaction.

Results. Our research revealed differences in the dynamics of PWB and SWB levels in adolescents during their transition from primary to basic secondary school. It also identified the specifics of longitudinal relationships between conscious SR, PWB, and SWB in adolescence. We showed that there was a reciprocal relationship between them. However, the most significant cross-longitudinal effects were established between SR and school-related SWB. These effects changed over time: at the beginning, well-being acted as a significant factor of self-regulation, while later self-regulation acted as a significant resource for maintaining adolescent well-being in the subsequent years.

Conclusion. School-related SWB is characterized by the most pronounced trajectory of change, while PWB is characterized by greater stability and insignificant growth. Our three-year longitudinal study demonstrated that the link between self-regulation and well-being is consistently reproduced. Conscious self-regulation is a significant resource for both the psychological and school subjective well-being of adolescents.