As the transition period from primary to secondary education is difficult for many students, our strive is to study the psychological features, which may scaffold student’s promotion and provide for future successful learning. We consider the educational media to be a complex system of psychological features, which depend on the content of education and the way, in which the educational process is organized. The “activity-and-content oriented” educational media devised after theoretical principles of the Developmental Instruction (Davydov), according to our hypothesis, provides sound bases for primary competencies formation, which are vital for secondary education. To test this assumption, we have diagnosed the quality of reflection, analysis, planning, model-acquisition and model-application, achieved by 204 students from two different educational media (“activity-and-content oriented” and “knowledge oriented”). For assessment purposes two diagnostic tools were used: “Transpositions” and “Moon” test. Both tests exploited contexts, which were unfamiliar to both groups of students. The results show, that students from the “activity-and-content” oriented educational media performed significantly better in most cognitive primary concepts. We consider these findings to support our major hypothesis, that educational media is a powerful source to scaffold students’ primary competencies’ formation, which in its turn provides for successful learning in secondary school.
We construct an introductory Natural Sciences curriculum that meets the demands of the «cultural-historical school». Our main task was to find the conditions that contribute to the formation of model mediation of text understanding within the Natural Sciences course, the content of which represents a purposeful transformation of natural materials in accordance with the cultural-historical specifics of human activity. To explore how schoolchildren acquire orienting functions of learning texts and models supporting the logical-genetic reconstruction of the natural scientific knowledge, we conducted an experimental teaching course in Natural Sciences for 2nd-graders (21 students, 102 academic hours). Our lessons proved a principal possibility of unfolding subject and model components of the course through the organization of joint actions consistent with the tasks of learning activity development in primary school children. Also, we assessed model-building skills in text understanding and task solving in children of two schools: the first group (103 students, 68 academic hours) studied the course we had developed, and the second group (80 students, 68 academic hours) received standard school courses. A significant improvement of model-building in the experimental group as compared to the control group suggests that cultural-activity-based introduction to Natural Sciences may have a certain potential in promoting the acquisition of orienting functions of learning models, which is vital for future advancement in middle and high school.
The purpose of our work was to study the factors that determine the effectiveness of model acquisition in solving inquiry-based problems (balance scale problem). An experimental lesson, which we conducted in the 4th grade, revealed the differences in the way children refer to a general method of assessing equilibrium provided by the teacher. At the end of the lesson a test was conducted. Its results allowed us to divide the participants (22 students) into two groups according to their success, which depended on whether they applied the model, that they had tried out during the lesson. The performance of students in the «Transpositions» test (A.Z. Zak), which was designed to identify students' approach to solving inquiry-based problems («empirical» or «theoretical»), showed significant differences in the level of reflection, analysis, and planning between the two groups (according to the Mann-Whitney criterion p<0.01). These results and data analysis allow us to connect the success of the modeling means' acquisition to the predominance of either an «empirical» or a «theoretical» approach to mastering ways of solving a new problem.
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