Aim/Purpose: The present quantitative, cross-sectional study aimed to investigate objective and subjective factors in the self-determination of doctoral students in their educational activities. Objective determinants included major discipline and forms of academic and scholarly activity (that is, attending classes and writing papers), and subjective determinants included personal characteristics of the doctoral students, including dispositional autonomy and perceptions of environmental supports for students’ basic psychological needs. Background: The quality of students’ motivation for learning has been linked with many different outcomes. Specifically, students who are more internally motivated (that is, who engage in learning activities for reasons that are personally important and freely chosen) demonstrate better performance outcomes and are more likely to choose and to persist in challenging tasks, to enjoy learning, to exhibit greater creativity, and in general to experience greater psychological well-being. Important questions remain, however, regarding the sources that affect student motivation, in particular at the level of graduate school. The present study expands on existing research by exploring contributions to students’ motivation both from the students, themselves, and from supports stemming from two interpersonal contexts: close relationships and the university environment. Methodology: Participating in the study were 112 doctoral students from various natural sciences departments of a major university in the Volga region of Russia. Self-report measures included dispositional autonomy, motivation for various types of academic and scholarly activity, and satisfaction of basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness in various interpersonal contexts. Analyses included descriptive statistics, comparison of mean differences, correlation, and structural equation modeling. Contribution: The present study goes beyond existing research by considering both dispositional and situational factors that influence the motivation of doctoral students for their scholarly and academic activities, and by comparing the impact on motivation of close personal relationships with that of various interpersonal contexts in the university setting. Findings: Doctoral students reported greater supports for their basic needs (for competence, autonomy, and relatedness) from their close personal relationships than in their university contexts. Students felt less support for their autonomy and competence with their research supervisor than in other university settings. The early stages of a scholarly activity, such as gathering sources and analyzing materials, were more likely to be characterized by external motivation, whereas the later stages, like the actual writing of a manuscript, were more likely to be internally motivated. When competing for variance, need supports from university-based but not from close personal relationships were significant contributors to students’ internal motivation for scholarly and academic activity; this effect, however, was fully mediated through students’ own dispositional autonomy. Recommendations for Practitioners: The present study underscores the importance of creating an environment in the university that supports doctoral students’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Educators, and in particular research supervisors, should attend to the ways in which their policies and practices support versus undermine these needs, which are shown to play an important role in promoting doctoral students’ own internal motivation for their scholarly and academic activities. Recommendation for Researchers: Although in this sample need supports from university-based interpersonal contexts outweighed the role of need supports from close personal relationships, in terms of doctoral students’ scholarly and academic motivation, it seems important to keep both contexts in mind, given the general importance of close relationships for motivation and other educational and well-being outcomes. As well, accounting for students’ own dispositional attributes, such as their own personal tendency toward autonomy, seems a critical counterpoint to looking at environmental contributions. Future Research: Future research should examine whether the mediational model tested in the present study applies to other samples of doctoral students, for example, to those from other disciplines, such as the humanities, and those in other cultural or geographic locations, where it is possible that close personal relationships may contribute more substantially to students’ motivation than was the case in the present sample. As well, future studies would do well to include other relevant outcomes, such as academic grades, successful degree completion, and measures of well-being, in order to confirm previous findings of the link between internal motivation and various educational outcomes.

The article analyzes the role of realizability of personal values in the formation of a person's life space and world of life. The author claims that barriers to the realization of personal values are manifestations of the functional mechanism of the value-sense sphere of personality.In contemporary psychology extensive research has been done on the conceptual aspects of values: new types of values and new approaches to classifying them have been proposed. The dynamic aspects of values are being studied primarily in terms of their content, that is, from the perspective of changes that occur within the hierarchy of values in association with factors such as age and profession, among many others, when people reassess their primary life priorities. Much less research has addressed the aspects of values that are associated with transformations of the significance of values when there is tension between their significance and importance, on the one hand, and applicability and attainability, on the other. However, specifically those transformations of significance, reflecting the possibility of realizing a value in life,

The purpose of this article was to compile a general map of existing research on digital education from the Self-determination theory (SDT) perspective, in order to understand SDT's contribution to the emerging field of research on digital technologies in education, the methods used to advance this research, the gaps in existing research, and the development of the theory itself in this context. Methods include searching in databases or search engines and chaining from known research papers. Papers were classed as relevant if their primary focus was to explore the Self-determination theory perspective for digital education. Articles published over the past twelve years in leading scientific journals were analyzed and synthesized. Results show that this theory is actively used both in studies on digital education and in the development of training programs. It makes a significant contribution to solving the problem of continuing digital learning and its motivation, to predicting the academic success of students, to increasing teachers' motivation to use digital resources. The ideas of SDT have become an important reference point in various formats of digital education: MOOC, hybrid virtual classes, mobile applications, etc. The study found that digital education technologies provide many opportunities to satisfy the need for autonomy whereas they pose the greatest challenge to the need for relatedness. Research in the context of digital education provides new perspectives for the development of SDT, clarifying the relationships of basic needs among themselves. The materials presented in the article are useful for planning further research from the point of view of SDT, as well as for use in the development of digital educational resources. The scientific novelty of this study is to collate, highlight and generalize the directions of application of Selfdetermination theory in the rapidly developing field of digital education. As an original result, a new general map of the main areas of such research has been created. The review categorizes the literature into five different areas: predicting motivation and intentions to continue digital learning, predicting student academic success, combining SDT ideas with other theories in digital education research, application of SDT for creating online courses, and teachers' readiness to use digital education.

The main objective of the research is to create and approbate a new way of reflection formation in future teachers, which would increase the level of classifying thinking to the theoretical one. The "Formation of equivalence groups" technique was modified to conduct the experiment. It was carried out both individually and in collaborative discussions in pairs which involved justification. This made it possible to reveal the degree of the reflection conformity to the norms of scientific thinking in solving classification problems, the main obstacles to the application of these norms and ways to overcome them. Results. As a result the ways of reflection were identified. The experiment resulted in the identification of two ways of substantiating solutions to classification tasks and processes of reflection: reflexive and pseudo-reflexive. The typology of pseudo-reflexive assessments is presented. Evaluation of an intuitively correct solution to a task anticipates a cogent justification of the reflexive process. Underdeveloped reflexive processes can limit the capacity of adults for scientific classification thinking. Existing methods of logic classes study at a higher school context do not provide well-developed scientific theoretical knowledge. Existing methods do not provide its scientific-theoretical level. Reflexive processes corresponding to this type of thinking are to be developed in a classification logic norms study. A wider use of specific sign means will provide an effective differentiation of reflexive and pseudo-reflexive forms. The development and enhancement of reflexive processes in relation to the assessment of educational outcomes can be undertaken with the help of formalized tools. Presented in the article technology of pseudo reflexive forms diagnostics and technology of reflection initiation based on the logic of classes promotes the rise of classification thinking to the theoretical level. The proposed type of tasks is not connected with the content of a certain scientific discipline and can be applied at different levels of education.

The relevance of the subject is set by the contradiction existing in science concerning the understanding of psychological sense of the disparity between the importance of value and the assessment of its realization in life: in one case it is understood as sense-making, in another-as conflicting or meaning semantic vacuum. This issue was regarded in the empirical research via the identification in what way the difference of values importance and attainability parameters is connected with the level of life meaningfulness on the sample of people aged from 15 to 40 years old. The results suggested that the total difference of these parameters in the personality value system is not associated with the level of life meaningfulness, and thus, the disparity may provide values with additional incentive potential, and conflict sense, and be neutral as well. There have been found few links of life meaningfulness with the disparity of importance and attainability of some values that highlights spheres of age-related or situational tasks for a human to solve. The article proceedings may be useful from their theoretical point of view to specify patterns concerning valuable and meaning regulation of life, from practical point of view they may help to understand the complex role of values importance and attainability disparity in person's psychological wellbeing.Keywords: value, personal value-meaning system, importance of value, attainability of value, the disparity of importance and attainability of value, meaningfulness of life

The comparison of substantial and dynamic parameters of personal value-meaning systems of American and Russian students (n=56) has revealed social and cultural differences among them. Substantial specifics demonstrate differences in the ranking of such values as freedom, health, cognition and close friendship within the general hierarchy of personal values. Dynamic specifics, in their turn, reveal themselves in a difference of perception of the attainability of values as well as in the level of realizability of the said values. The amount of the latter is significantly higher in American students. Results of this research show that American students have defined their life goals through the process of education and fulfill the existential phase of realization of meaningfulness. Russian students, on the contrary, are still in the process of searching for meaning of activity and have not made their choice of life perspectives yet.

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At a time when educators in many countries are adopting digital technology in their classrooms, whether by choice or mandate, the question of what the experience of online learning is like for students remains open and of vital interest. In the present study, adult learners (N = 37) in Russia were asked to write an essay about their experience of an online course they had taken as part of their graduate studies. Responses were examined by means of thematic analysis. From the conceptual framework of self-determination theory, responses were categorized with respect to psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Adult learners reported their online courses provided the greatest opportunities to satisfy the need for autonomy, with ample support for competence as well; however, they struggled in their online courses to find satisfaction for the relatedness need. The present study identified those elements of online courses that correspond with and facilitate the satisfaction of each of the three basic psychological needs.