Children Psychology and Psychologyof Development

This article discusses the role that psychological culture of class teacher plays in the establishment and maintenance of psychological safety in a modern schoolchild. The problem of protection against psychological abuse within the educational environment of a school is particularly important in the current socio-cultural realm. The article analyzes many pedagogical and psychological studies regarding the problem of psychological education of teachers. It discusses contradiction between the objective need to create a psychologically safe learning environment and the unwillingness of teachers to work on it due to low own level of psychological culture. The author introduced the original structural model of psychological culture of a class teacher, representing the integration of the three main components: the culture of pedagogical refl ection, emotional culture and culture of pedagogical infl uence.

The article presents the results of theoretical and experimental research on emotional states, in particular, on fears that worry young school-aged children. The approach used to study this phenomenon comprises quantitatively-qualitative, frequency-intensive, existential, micro- and macro surrounding, moral and selfregulation dimensions. Substantial characteristics of children’s fears, self-control of young school-aged children, and ways of coping with fears in various conditions of social situations of development are considered. The studied spectrum of emotions young school-aged children experience in everyday situations (at home, at school, during their leisure time) is described. Study on verbal and nonverbal patterns of fears of young school-aged children is presented. The original structural questionnaire developed by the author and the picturesque test composed the research apparatus. In a majority of drawings children tend to “counterbalance” the image of their fear with some additional images containing positive elements (positive plot). This finding confirms the assumption previously made by the author of the immanent nature of self-regulating processes that regulate coping with fear.

350 7 to 14-year-old students of a special school for children with severe speech and language disorders (SLD) were tested through psychological, neurolinguistic and clinical methods. It was a longitudinal study. During 4-5 years of studying at the special school, the majority of speech and language impairments reduce and communicative skills grow up. But the other students demonstrate regress of adaptation skills, intellectual efficiency and increase in restlessness, aggressive behavior, mood disorders, and neurotic disorders. We recognize it as the state of exacerbation. Comparative statistical analysis reveals that this state occurs mostly between 9.5 and 11.5 years of life. 50% of the decompensation cases observed occurs in this age range. The data obtained gave us an incentive to develop a prevention program. The target group included a population aged 9.5-10 with PSU (PPMI-program). The 2-year experience of incorporating the risk subgroup of SLIC into the PPMI-program gave a positive return. The amount of decompensations reduced significantly. Intensity of psychopatological disorders decreased.

The main research objective was to study characteristics of children community`s mutual activities that infl uence the eff ectiveness of implementing security in the children`s community. In the process of training course taught using diff erent programs followed by comparison of the resulted actions in an emergency situation of three school classes (N=527) the following conclusion was made: the class that had an integrated basic safety course and at the same time attended practical classes and psychological trainings, coped with an emergency situation more effectively, quicker and with fewer personal injuries.

The article presents a study of moral judgments shared by children and teenagers. Its results form a foundation for further enquiry into sources and conditions developing young people’s normative control system, the flexibility of this system, and the “limits” of its development defined by a particular culture. It goes on to pose questions on research methodology at the levels of either hypothetical explanatory models or the means of diagnostics. J. Piaget's investigation of children's moral judgments was prototypical for this research. The technical equipment rendered possible a more subtle analysis of the children's judgments, which, in its turn, enabled us not only to define the general tendency of development, but also to determine a number of factors of how the normative regulation of children of different ages is functioning.

A system genetics approach has been employed to study students’ mental development. Ability development is considered in terms of mastering of intellectual operations. The study endeavors to identify the components of certain abilities consciously acquired by a student in the process of learning. The study was arranged in two directions: the teaching of students to master intellectual operations and use them in their work with training materials, and psychological testing of control and experimental student groups before and after training tests to diagnose the level of intellectual development. The study involved teachers and students of primary and secondary school.

We describe preliminary data from two studies aimed at investigating the psychometric properties and validity of newly developed measures of morphological knowledge and skills in Russian, namely, the Word Structure subtest, and the Test of Morphological Awareness, in two samples of young Russian-speaking children. Overall, both instruments demonstrated good psychometric properties when analyzed using both classical test theory and a Rasch-modeling IRT approach, and were positively associated with the criterion measures (i.e., the number of grammatical errors in elicited speech samples, spelling, and reading comprehension).