Educational psychology

The goals set forth in regulatory documents for the development of Russian education presuppose quantitative evaluation of factors and conditions that ensure students’ achievement of high competence, personality development, and self-realization. Evaluation of intellectual and personality characteristics of first-year university students and study of the relationship among these characteristics thus become important tasks.

The research objective was to evaluate relationships among social and abstractlogical types of intelligence, personality characteristics, and exam effectiveness (performance).

The study sample was made up of 900 first-year university students (55.2% female and 44.8% male) from Tomsk State University who filled in paper-and-pencil forms in Russian: The Evaluation of Choice in Conflict Situations Questionnaire, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, the Self-Organization of Activity, the Reflexivity Type Assessment Test, the Self-Determination Scale, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, and the World Assumptions Scale. Scores on the Unified National Examination in Mathematics (UNE in Mathematics) and the first exam results at the university were used to measure academic performance. The data were statistically processed using descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, and factor analysis.

The preference for compromising and collaborating strategies indicates a high level of social intelligence and contributes to socio-psychological adaptation of young people to conditions of university education that are new to them, which require greater independence and activity. Social intelligence and abstract-logical intelligence are relatively independent intelligence types.

Social intelligence and personality characteristics are not determinants of scores on the UNE in Mathematics. Probably the process of educating students in mathematics in the graduating classes of Russian secondary schools is replaced by training to solve problems on the UNE, so that students’ individual characteristics in preparation for the test are no longer factors that influence exam effectiveness. A disparity between social and abstract-logical types of intelligence is accompanied by low academic effectiveness. Proportional development of social and abstract-logical types of intelligence may be an important factor in achieving high academic effectiveness.

In the modern world, the environment of any educational institution represents a spectrum of ethnic groups and subcultures: a multicultural educational environment. Pupils who are aware of their national identity often demonstrate intolerance toward students of other nationalities, which threatens pupils’ psychological safety. In this article, we present the results of pilot research examining the level of a pupil’s psychological safety in the multicultural educational environment and identifying the criteria that influence a pupil’s psychological safety. The research sample comprised 127 pupils aged 13–14 years from different schools living in various places that differed by the type of settlement, industrial development and level of science and culture. We isolated the following criteria for a pupil’s psychological safety in the multicultural educational environment: satisfaction with the educational environment, protection from psychological abuse and self-confidence. According to pupils, the essential characteristics of safety in the educational environment, regardless of school category and type, are being able to ask for help, protection of personal dignity, interactions with other students, and self-respect.

Empirical data reveal the current status of the psychological safety of the entire sample group (n = 127) and compare indices of psychological safety in the educational institutions under study.

Analysis of the results of our research indicates that protecting a pupil’s personality in the multicultural educational environment has the greatest influence on his/her psychological safety. In addition, a comfortable psychological atmosphere, mutual aid and support of pupils and low levels of classmates’ and coevals’ aggression positively influence the protection experience.

This article sets forth the main results of a study analyzing attitudes toward psychoactivesubstance (PAS) effects. These findings demonstrate the conditionality of social, historic, and cultural views of PAS effects. Despite the threat posed by increasing high school and university students’ drug involvement, exploration of this phenomenon in the format of scientific discourse has been limited so far.

In 2014–2015, in Yekaterinburg, Moscow, and Krasnoyarsk a survey to evaluate perceptions of high school and university students about PAS effects was conducted (289 respondents, aged 16–22).The methods used included the semantic differential (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test modified by A.G. Shmelyov), a modified version of the Rokeach Value Survey, word associations, and content analysis.

The use of psychoactive substances is a specific social practice emerging in a certain social context that includes both drug-addicted and PAS-free young people. Examination of the factors affecting the formation of views about PAS effects and the dynamics of youth values is possible by using a bio-psycho-socio paradigm for performing a complex analysis of cognitive, behavioral, and value parameters.

As documented in the respondents’ perceptions, distinctive features that are characteristic of drug addicts and that are seen in their behavior area loss of control over behavior, emotions, and volition; changes in value systems; and a tendency to develop a manipulative communication style.

Within the system of their social perceptions the respondents endowed drug-addicted persons with pronounced negative characteristics (“aggressiveness,” “addiction,” “stupidity,” “light-mindedness”). Still, they stated that drug abusers are capable of being active, decisive, cheerful, generous, and flexible. The value analysis demonstrated that terminal values appreciated by the school and university students included health, true friends, love, happy family life, active life, and self-development. Receiving pleasure through methamphetamine intake and a burst of energy through PAS intake were considered worthless even though the survey demonstrated the respondents’ use of psychoactive substances.

It is well-known that communication is the main source and necessity of human development and activity. It promotes social relationships, self-image and a wide range of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Preschoolers communicate both with their peers and adults. It is traditionally assumed that peer communication greatly depends on the teacher-child interaction, leading role of the adult, and the child’s own activity, which are the main elements of the Russian preprimary education system.

Changes in social situations, reductions in available play time, greater engagement of children in activities and many other factors can affect modern preschoolers’ peer communication. Therefore, the effect of teacher-directed and child-directed teacherchild interactions on preschoolers’ peer communication important to study.

The following methods were applied: peer-communication observation, the behavioral tests ‘Magic room’ and ‘Mosaic’, and the sociometric procedure ‘Two houses’. The sample included 49 Moscow preprimary students aged 4 to 6 year old (25 girls and 24 boys).

The research proved that preschoolers showed better results in child-directed interactions, such as playing skills, compared with a similar situation in which the children were directed by the teachers. Additionally, the level of proactiveness, communication success, conflict resolution, prosocial behavior and emotional response to peer influence did not differ among children.

Thus, the child-directed approach is more beneficial to preschoolers’ communication development than a teacher-directed approach.

Determination of the personality’s psychological resources that ensure its resilience to negative effects of the social environment is a priority problem in modern society, science, and education, since we currently see a sharp increase in the number of factors that affect psychological hardiness and security. One of these is intensification of violent and aggressive forms of interaction in educational institutions. Such manifestations are especially dangerous in schools, since, by virtue of their age-specific features, students are the most vulnerable and they subsequently translate the acquired values and behaviors to society as a whole. The goal of this empirical study was to identify teenagers’ psychological resources that determine their resilience to various forms of psychological violence in the educational environment. The study covered four St. Petersburg high schools, with 437 teenagers aged from 16.5 to 17 (189 boys and 248 girls). A questionnaire was developed to divide the subjects into groups with high and low levels of protection (security) against psychological violence in the educational environment. The questionnaire lists forms of psychological violence in the educational environment (identified by theoretical review) that can occur in interpersonal communication between peers and between teachers and students. The respondents evaluated each item of the questionnaire in accordance with the proposed scale of frequency with which each form of violence occurred. Theoretical analysis determined that psychological violence is traumatic for the adolescent personality’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral spheres. The teenagers’ psychological resources of resilience to violence in the educational environment were identified with the aid of psychodiagnostic methods addressing each of them. Our study allows us to conclude that the resources that ensure the teenager’s resilience to the negative effect of psychological violence in the educational environment are: satisfaction with oneself, accepting oneself as a personality with positive and socially desirable characteristics; high level of self-control, well- developed ability to behave in an acceptable way whatever the circumstances; openness and goodwill, self-confidence; perception of the surrounding world as friendly and generous, which gives rise to friendly behavior; holistic perception of the world, experiencing the present moment in one’s life in its entirety, striving for personal development and self-improvement; independence of values and behavior from external factors; significance of such values as achievement, self-development, and high financial position, in combination with a priority on learning and education; explanation as a typical mechanism of psychological protection, search for a reasonable basis for justifying behavior and actions as well as impulsive acts; low level of anxiety, aggressiveness, and rigidity. The results obtained can be useful for researching the resource-oriented approach to psychology, and also for the development of follow-up techniques for ensuring the safety of the educational environment, preventing all forms of violence in interpersonal interaction between students and teachers.