Sending the child to school, any parent would like his child to successfully master the curriculum and be on an excellent account with the teaching staff. Good studies, high marks - this is what every child should ideally strive for, because the result of work, in the end, will be admission to the chosen university and the start of a successful career.

School success of any student consists of two main factors: positive study and exemplary behavior. As a rule, they go side by side, but there are also exceptions when ideal behavior is accompanied by poor academic performance and vice versa - if an all-A student behaves defiantly and even aggressively at school. But such cases are extremely rare.

Not every child can achieve impressive results in school, but with a competent approach of parents and the desire of the student himself, this is possible.

Family and upbringing

The origins of good learning always lie in the family environment, including what kind of goals and efforts the parents of the student set for themselves. At the same time, one should not confuse the desire to create conditions for their child for successful learning and the desire of adults to realize through their son or daughter dreams and plans that were not realized in their youth.

In this regard, it will be much more effective for the child to see in front of him example of their parents- successful, active, proactive. Subconsciously, children strive to be like their fathers and mothers, so following the positive example of older family members will encourage the child to be more diligent in their studies.

The family atmosphere has a great influence on the child. Thus, a favorable environment and goodwill contribute to the creation of conditions in which the student can learn and develop with pleasure. And, on the contrary, unhealthy relationships between loved ones, scandals or indifference, coldness spend a lot of attention and emotional strength of the child, thereby preventing the assimilation of the school curriculum.

The factors of successful study include material prosperity in the family. Wealthier families have the opportunity to connect qualified teachers and tutors to school education, thereby increasing the level of knowledge of the child and his preparation for final work and exams. But this does not mean at all that children from families with an income below the average are deprived of the opportunity to graduate brilliantly from school, but they are often forced to master complex topics and disciplines on their own. An excess of finances can play a cruel joke with a child, spoiling him. For those children who are not at all materially constrained, study often fades into the background. The attention of wealthy schoolchildren is switched to interesting leisure and entertainment that such children can afford.

It’s good when parents find the “golden mean” in this, controlling the child and at the same time supporting his initiative in every possible way, ensuring his studies, but not giving him “slack”.

And yet, you should not build a cult for a student to get excellent marks. Both adults and children it is necessary to understand why the child goes to school and why does he need to study. Sometimes schoolchildren themselves set themselves the goal of making progress in learning, just to please mom and dad. That is why one of the key tasks of parents is to correctly motivate their child and set him the right guidelines.

Atmosphere at school

Another key factor influencing children's academic performance is the environment in the educational institution that the child attends. The way a student goes to school with what feelings has an impact on his success.

It's no secret that a lot depends on the teacher. It is not uncommon for the same child with one teacher to be reluctant to attend classes, without learning anything (and therefore wasting time at school), and with another - easily, even playfully, studying this or that discipline. Teachers, who lead the lesson lively and with interest, are able to infect whole classes with their love for the subject.. And vice versa, a teacher, for whom “teacher” is an unloved profession, but not a vocation, is unlikely to be able to interest the audience, since he himself is bored in his lessons.

In addition to teachers, academic performance is influenced by the immediate environment of children- classmates. If there is a tendency to learn through the sleeves in the class, there is not much hope that the child will become a straight A student - especially if the quitters are among the student's closest friends. Unfortunately, bad influence is a very serious factor in school failure.

It happens that because of the fear of becoming a victim of ridicule and being branded as a “nerd”, a “nerd”, a child deliberately does not break out into excellent students, although he has every opportunity for this.

Student Ability

Whatever the environment of the student at home or in an educational institution, child's personality plays an important role- character traits, the ability to digest new information, personal preferences. The presence of a predisposition to study certain groups of subjects (technical or humanitarian) and even a general ability to learn greatly simplifies the child's stay at school and doing homework.

Of course, everyone would like parents to support the student and control the educational process, teachers were all speakers “on the same wavelength” with the class, and the students themselves were distinguished by their giftedness, intelligence and quick wits. But the combination of even several of these factors will have a beneficial effect on the child's academic performance.

The main thing is the faith of relatives in the success of the growing student and his sincere desire to learn. Then education within the school, which should become a stepping stone to a university or college, will be available, and the child will be able to successfully overcome this important stage on the way to his adulthood.

The Factors Influencing Students' Performance
at Universiti Teknologi MARA Kedah, Malaysia

Norhidayah Ali, Kamaruzaman Jusoff (Corresponding Author),
Syukriah Ali, Najah Mokhtar, Azni Syafena Andin Salamat

12/20/2009

Many studies are carried out with the aim of studying the factors that affect student achievement (academic achievement). The purpose of this study is to identify and study the factors that affect student performance at Universiti Teknologi MARA Kedah, Malaysia. A set of questionnaires handed out to relevant respondents. Several factors that are discussed in this study are demographics, active learning, student attendance, participation in extracurricular activities, mutual influence, and course evaluation. Data were analyzed using descriptive analysis, factor analysis, reliability tests, and Pearson correlations in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). After factor analysis, all variables are grouped into five factors that exclude the influence of peers. The researchers found that four factors positively affect student achievement which are demographics, active learning, student attendance, and student participation. extracurricular activities. However, grades were found to be negatively associated with student performance. Further research on student performance could be conducted on a larger scale, including all UiTMs to get a better score.

1. Introduction

There are a large number of higher education institutions in Malaysia which are regulated and run by the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE), Malaysia. As of today, Malaysia has 20 public universities(mohe.gov.my) and the MARA University of Technology (UiTM), which is the largest university in Malaysia with over 100,000 students and branches in 14 regions across the country (www2.uitm.edu.my/).

Students are the main assets of universities. Student achievement (achievement) plays an important role in the production of the best quality graduates, who will become an excellent leader and workforce for the country, thus responsible for countries' economic and social development. The performance of students in universities should be a concern not only for administrators and teachers, but also for corporations in the labor market. Achievement is one of the main factors taken into account by an employer when hiring employees, especially graduates. Therefore, students must put great effort into their study in order to get a good grade in order to fulfill the employer's requirement. Student performance is determined by the cumulative grade point average (CGPA). The CGPA shows the overall performance of students, where it takes into account the average of all class exams for all semesters during the period of stay at the university. A host of factors can act as a barrier and catalyst for students to achieve a high CGPA that reflects their overall academic performance.

There are several ways to determine a student's progress, which are cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA), Grade Point Average (GPA), tests and others. In Malaysia, PAC-based academic evaluation researchers (Ervina and Othman, 2005; Manan and Mohamad, 2003 and Agus and Makhbul, 2002). In addition, a study in the United States by Nonis and Wright (2003) also assessed student performance based on the CGPA.

Most of the studies done in other countries use GPA as a measure of achievement (Galiher 2006; Darling 2005; Broh, 2002; Stephens and Schaben 2002 and Amy 2000). They used the GPA because they are looking at student performance for a particular semester. Some other researchers have used test scores as they study subject-specific performance (Saeed Tahir Hijazi and S.M. Mraze Naqvi, 2006; Heck, 1998 and Tho, 1994).

2. Literature review

Many studies have been developed regarding factors affecting student performance such as demographics, active learning, student attendance, extracurricular activities, peer influence and of course grades. Research has shown that demographic characteristics can influence academic achievement. Among these characteristics are parents' income, parents' education and English result in Siji Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM).

Nasri and Ahmed (2007) in their study for business travel of students (students and non-students) in the United Arab Emirates suggest that non-national students had a higher GPA was more competent in English, which is reflected in a higher mean for high school English language. Ervin and MD, neither (2005) found that not every subject taken by students prior to university entry has a positive relationship with their final CGPA in the degree program. At the RP level, the five subjects that have achieved positive relationships with final CGPA students are English, Modern Mathematics, Advanced Mathematics, Physics and Principle of Accounting.

An investigation by Agus and Makhbul (2002) showed that students from high-income families perform better in academic assessment (CGPA) compared to those who come from low-income families. Their research has shown that most students come from families in the income bracket from rm1,rm4, to 000 to 000. Checks (2000) also concluded that family income provides an incentive to improve student achievement; Wealthier parents have learned to influence this by investing more in their children's education. When the investment is made, the student will fulfill the parents' expectations of better academic performance. On the basis of research conducted by him, he has demonstrated that children from wealthy families do better than those from poorer families. On the other hand, Saeed Tahir Hijazi and SM Mraze Naqvi (2006) found that there is a negative relationship between student academic achievement and student family income. A study by Beblo and Lauer (2004) also found that parents' income and their labor market status had little effect on children's education.

According to Yermish and Francesconi (2001), there is a significant gradient between the level of education of parents and the level of education of their child. In relation to a parent with no qualifications, a mother's education has a stronger association with her child's education than a father's education. This result is supported by Agus and Makhbul (2002). They indicate that mother's educational level was found to have a strong influence on academic performance compared to father's educational level.

Active learning has received particular attention over the past few years. In a college context, active learning involves students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing (Bonwell and Eison, 1991). Active learning involves students to solve problems, answer questions, formulate questions on their own, discuss, explain, debate, brainstorming or during class (www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Cooperative_Learning.hml). Bonwell & Eison (1991) concluded that active learning leads to improved student attitudes and improved student thinking and writing. A study by Wilke (2003) also indicated that students in both the treatment and control groups demonstrated a positive attitude towards active learning, believing it helped (or would help) students to learn the material. Felder fl. Al. (2000) recommends active learning is one of the learning methods that work. Felder and Brent (2003) noted that as little as five minutes of such things (active learning) in 50 minutes of class can produce a powerful stimulus in learning. In their opinion, this (active learning) wakes up students: students who successfully complete the assignment of their own knowledge in this way, they would never from just watching a lecturer do it. However, DeLonge (2008), research does not support the hypothesis that active learning based learning methodology will result in a positive change in personal effectiveness, measured by course score and non-intellectual knowledge factors, as measured by prof-R (test-reactions and Adaptation to College-Revised), a general measure of college adjustment. He found that factors such as professor-student rapport and professor's understanding of non-intellectual factors can affect current results.

Many researchers recognize that attending classes is an important aspect in improving academic performance (for example, in Russia, in order to order a test, essay, problem solving or term paper, it is enough to fill out an assessment form - http://reshim24.ru/). A study by Collette et. Al., 2007; Stynka, 2006; chow-chow, 2003; Rogers, 2001; Durden and Ellis, 1995; Romer 1993 found that attendance had a small but statistically significant effect on student achievement. Marburger (2001) concluded that students who missed class on a given date were more likely to incorrectly answer questions regarding material that day than were students who were present. Moore (2006) noted that class attendance improves learning; on average, students who came to the most classes received high grades, despite the fact that they did not receive any points for the class. Arulampalam fl. Al. (2007) found that there is a causal relationship between absence and performance for students: missing a class results in a drop in performance. On the other hand, Martins and Walker (2006) noted that there were no significant effects on class attendance. This is also confirmed by Kerr Park (1990) and Schmidt (1993), who found an inverse relationship between student attendance and their course grades.

Many extracurricular activities have been found to be helpful in creating and reinforcing academic achievement, even if the activities are not obviously relevant to academic subjects (Marsh & Kleitman, 2002; Evaluation and Schneider, 2003 and Lauren Sparks, 2004). One study on teens and extracurricular activities found that teens who participated in extracurricular activities had higher grades, more positive attitudes towards school, and higher academic aspirations (Darling, Caldwell and Smith, 2005). Total participation in extracurricular activities (TEAP), or participation in extracurricular activities in general, is associated with improved GPA, higher academic aspirations, increased college attendance, and reduced absenteeism (Broh, 2002). There are so many positive things for students to see from their participation in extracurricular activities. Proponents of extracurricular activities (Fretwell, 1931; Fozzard, 1967; Melnick, Moyer, and Patrick, 1956; Sybouts & Krepel, 1984) argue that this non-formal aspect of education has a good deal to foster the development of good citizens, allowing students to communicate adequately, preparing them for economic independence, developing a healthy mind in a healthy body, preparing them for family life, guiding their use of free time, developing themselves a set of moral and ethical values, developing social competence, identifying special interests and abilities and developing creative expression. Extra-curricular participation was positively associated with success rates like high attendance, academic achievement, and commitment to continuing education among public high school students in 1992 (NCE Educational Policy, June 1995).

Darling et al (2005) conducted a longitudinal study regarding extracurricular activities and their outcomes showing that students who took part in school extracurricular activities had higher rankings, higher academic aspirations, and higher scientific views. Students participating in athletics are said to build character, instill respect for the Rules, encourage teamwork and sportsmanship, promote healthy competition and perseverance, and provide a sense of accomplishment. (Little and Smith, 2002). Organized sports provide an opportunity for initiative, emotional regulation, goal setting, persistence, problem solving, and time management (Larsen, Hansen, and moneta. 2006), which may help explain the relationship found between athletic participation and academic achievement (Mahoney and Cairns, 1997; marsh and Kleitman, 2002). While scholars agree that extracurricular activities do, in fact, affect student achievement, Bordet (1998) shows that extracurricular activities are not associated with student achievement. One study, conducted by the National Education Longitudinal Study, found that “participation in some activities improves achievement, while participation in others detracts from achievement” (Broh, 2002). This is supported by Kimiko (2005), who found that participation in athletics, television viewing, and social services had a positive effect on academic performance while participation in musical performance did not improve academic performance. Participation in sports activities has also been shown to have a negative impact on student performance. Cited in Shernoff and Vandelle (2007), some findings about sports participation and its relationship to development and emotional adjustment were negative or mixed. Sports have been associated with developmental hazards such as personality retardation (Larson and Kleiber, 1993), increased levels of school deviance (Lamborn et. Al. 1992), high levels of alcohol consumption (Eccles and Barber, 1999), competition anxiety and egocentrism (Little and Smith, 2002) and bodily injury (Dane ET. Al. 2004).

Various studies have been done and found that peer influence has an impact on student achievement (Hanushek et. Al, 2002; Goethals, 2001; Gonzales et. Al., 1996; it has been shown that peer influence has a more powerful effect than immediate family. Support peer group was positively associated with cumulative mean student scores.Wilkinson and Fanga, (2002) concluded that; grouping students in heterogeneous learning ability (low ability students into a group with high ability students) will show improvements in learning and outcomes. students can positively influence less capable students Schindler (2003) who found that mixing abilities will affect weak students positively, however the effect for good students is negative This is in contrast to Goethals (2001) who found that students in homogeneous groups (regardless of ability or low ability) perform better than students in a heterogeneous group. Booking hotels giuliodori, so, Lujan and savages (2006) that by interacting with peers, students can enhance their ability to solve quality problematic issues. Peer learning also promotes student participation and increased academic achievement. (Rao and di Carlo 2000), Torke, Abraham & Upadhya (2007).

3. Data analysis and processing

This section presents the results and interpretations collected information. Data analysis consists of two sections in which:

Section 1 - Analysis of respondent profiles and demographic variables. There are gender, age, English score in JMP, parents' income, father's education and mother's education level.

Section 2 - Analysis of the relationship between student achievement and active forms of learning, participation in extracurricular activities, peer influence and, of course, assessment.

Questionnaires were sent out at random to diploma students from part II of part VI (semester July-November 2008). Out of 500 questionnaires, 418 questionnaires were completed, 82 questionnaires were rejected. Of the 418 respondents, 62.2% are women and 37.8% are men. The respondents are divided into four groups. The result shows that 64.8% of students aged 20-21; 28.5% aged 18-19; 6% are aged 22-23, and only 0.7% are 24 and above.

English grade B level JMPs are subdivided into grade eights. There are A1, A2, B3, B4, C5, C6, D7 and E8. The result showed that 23.4% scored C5 in the English class B level of RP; B3 scored 20.6%; 18.7% scored B4; C6 scored 12.2%; 11.5% scored A2; A1 scored 9.6%; 3.8% scored D7 and 2% students scored E8.

It was found that 42.8% of student parents' monthly income was below RM1000; 29.9% was 1000 RM2500; 12.4% was between RM2501 - RM4000; It was 8.9% between RM4001-RM5500 and only 6% above RM5500.

We found that 11.2% of student fathers had a high level of education in elementary school, 61% - at the secondary level (STPM, RP and PSA holder); while 27.8% was at the tertiary level (diploma, degree and above and other certificates)

Tertiary education of mothers 12% at the primary level; 68.7% at the average level (STTM, RP and PSA holder); and 19.3% was at the tertiary level (diploma, degree and above and other certificates)

Pearson Correlation Coefficient: Testing Hypotheses

There are five hypotheses that have been tested:

H1: there is a relationship between the performance of demographic variables and students H2: there is a relationship between active learning and student achievement

H3: There is a relationship between student attendance and student achievement.

H4: There is a relationship between participation in extracurricular activities and student achievement.

H5: there is a relationship between course assessment and student work

As in the relationship between the independent variables, based on the Pearson correlation, the correlation values ​​between the independent variables in our study of at least 0.7 indicates that the correlations between the independent variables are not too high. Active learning and student attendance were significant at the 0.01 level and 0.05 level, respectively.

This study is being conducted to identify factors that affect student performance at the diploma level in Whitm sneakers. The researchers found that there are five factors affecting student performance, demographics, student attendance, active learning, participation in extracurricular activities, and course evaluation. The relationship of the independent variables with the dependent variable was also examined. The CGPA is used as a measure of student performance. Of all the factors, four factors appear to be positively associated with CGPA students, which are demographics, student attendance, active learning, and participation in extracurricular activities, whereas scores showed a negative association. The results of the study have been summarized and discussed in the following paragraphs.

The results suggest that demographic variables are positively correlated with CGPA; it's 0.094. This means that those students whose parents have a college education and a high income have a larger CGPA. This conclusion is supported by Checchi (2000) in their study of university education in Italy. Checchi concluded that wealthier parents invest more in their children's education. Agus and Makhbul (2002) found that students from high-income families perform better in academic assessment (CGPAU) compared to those who come from low-income families.

The results show that students who are actively involved in learning experience a positive correlation with CGPA; which is 0.139, significant at the 0.01 level. This means that students who are actively involved in the learning process have a greater CGPA. This conclusion is also supported by a number of researchers such as Felder and Brent (2003), Wilkie (2002), Wilke (2002), Laws et. al. (1999), Hake (1998) and Bonwell & Eison (1991).

The researchers found that students who attended classes regularly received more CGPAU compared to those who were absent from class. It is proven by attendance results that the student has a positive relationship with the CGPA; it is 0.108, significant at the 0.05 level. Previous studies of machine tool (2006), Roger (2001), marburger (2001), Romer (1993), Darden and Ellis (1995) also concluded with the same finding.

The researchers found that students who actively participate in extracurricular activities received greater PAKU. This has been proven as a result of participation in extracurricular activities has a positive relationship with CGPA; which is 0.07. While the ratio of participation in extracurricular activities to academic achievement was not found to be statistically significant, there is strong evidence showing a positive association between the two variables; as in previous studies by Galiher (2006), Kimiko (2005), Lauren Sparks (2004), Marsh & Kleitman, (2002).

The researchers found that grades certainly had a negative relationship with CGPA students; this is -0.027. This result is contradicted by previous researchers such as Hanna (1993), Blair (2000) and Rum, Sparzo, & Bennett (1986), Dempster (1991) and Cotton (2001). This means that our survey respondents believe that frequent assessment does not help them improve their CGPA, more frequent assessment of the CGPA course lowers students.

Based on the findings and discussion of this study, the researchers made several recommendations in order to overcome the limitations and achieve better results for further research. These guidelines will also be helpful to administrators and educators. This study was done on the basis of students from Whitm Kedah only. Generalizing the results to other universities should be considered with some caution. For future research, the researchers suggest that research should cover all uitm students to better generalize the factors influencing student achievement. Research in general Whitm or universities of other Malaysians can also consider other factors such as student effort and personality.

The researchers suggest that "factual checks" should be carried out so that the conclusion is not only based on the students' perceptions, but also on the real situation. For example, to see the relationship between student attendance and performance, a researcher must select a sample size of students who attended school and students with the most absence and compare their CGPA. The same observation can be made as well from other factors.

This study provides information on student participation in extracurricular activities and whether it benefits or hinders student achievement. Further research can be carried out on various extra-curricular activities such as homogeneous bodies, sports, arts and drama, since each activity can have a different impact on student achievement. Active learning, student attendance, and participation in extracurricular activities were found to have a positive effect on academic achievement, so the researchers suggest several actions by teachers and administrators to help improve students' CGPA. Teachers are advised to improve their teaching method and encourage students to actively participate in the classroom, so that learning will be more effective. Students with a high rate of absenteeism should be screened and the necessary action taken against them to prevent any problems that would be detrimental to their PAC. Teachers and administrators should constantly remind students that extracurricular activities will indirectly contribute to their academic performance, for example, through the development of a healthy mind in a healthy body, developing a set of moral and moral values, development of social competence and high attendance.

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Psychological factors school success

The Ministry of Education and Science has determined what a teacher should know and be able to do in order to be able to work in a school. The main thing that a teacher should now be able to do is work with outstanding children. With young geniuses and inveterate hooligans, with the disabled and with the children of migrants. Consider today the causes of school difficulties and the problems of successful children.

Psychologists and educators have long dreamed of creating a school in which all children would be equally successful, and even offered specific ways to achieve educational balance.

All further development of psychological pedagogical science and educational practice can be considered as a movement towards the goal - the search for such ways of learning that would ensure the mastery of the curriculum by all children without exception. Subsequently, the development of issues of education and upbringing of children with developmental disorders of varying severity acted as an independent direction of theoretical and applied research, but today we will focus mainly on normally developing schoolchildren.

As practice shows, such an ideal school, in which there would be no underachieving students, so far exists only in our imagination. We are well aware of situations when children not only fail to cope with difficult learning tasks, but also make annoying mistakes when they need to answer simple questions.

Why do children not learn educational material, experience difficulties in communication, are sometimes aggressive, lazy, slow, etc.? These and many other questions concern teachers, psychologists, and parents. So far, they have not received an unequivocal answer, but even now it is possible to identify the conditions, the observance of which would contribute to better assimilation educational material and a noticeable increase in cognitive interest among schoolchildren.

At the same time, it should be noted that current education is in a state of constant change, and this cannot but affect the work of the teacher and, as a result, the results of mastering the curriculum by students. One does not need to be a specialist to pay attention to the changes that have taken place and are taking place in recent decades in the modern school. It:

• transition from four years of primary education to three years and vice versa;
• the introduction of an eleven-year education and discussion of the expediency of a twelve-year;
• the emergence of new academic disciplines;
• availability of public and private schools;
• changing the content of education in the direction of increasing the information to be assimilated;
• exclusion in a number of schools from curriculum subjects of a general developmental nature: labor, music, drawing;
• the introduction of the subject nature of education in primary school;
• the introduction of specialized education in high school, which has both positive (in-depth study of a number of subjects) and negative consequences (reduction of time allocated for the study of other subjects; inconsistency between profile and non-core school programs; limited opportunities to choose a specialty after school);
• the introduction of mandatory final certification in the form of the Unified State Examination and State Examination;
• the emergence of a large number of children for whom Russian is not their native language: this creates difficulties both in the transfer of educational material and of a socio-psychological nature;
• changing the order of financing, etc.

These are the objective, real-life difficulties that the modern school faces, they complicate the work of the teacher and contribute to the emergence of a wave of distrust towards all those who are related to education. Nevertheless, it must be recognized that the presence of these and other difficulties does not release the school and teachers from responsibility for the quality of education, since education leads the development of society.

With regret, we have to state that the fight against poor progress begins when it has already acquired a clearly expressed and stable form, leaving an imprint on the entire personality of the student - self-esteem, motives for activity, the system of relations with teachers, comrades and parents. A whole complex of secondary and sometimes tertiary formations is built over the primary insufficient assimilation of any section of the program, and a thorough analysis is needed in order to decide where to start the correction.

Practice has shown that conducting additional classes does not always lead to a positive result - to the elimination of existing gaps in the assimilation of school knowledge. Thus, the question of what these classes should be and how to prevent the appearance of school difficulties is still open. At the same time, the data accumulated by domestic psychologists make it possible, if not to solve the problem posed, then at least to find possible approaches to its solution.

In the psychological and pedagogical literature, much attention is paid to the analysis of factors that influence school performance. Among them, two large groups can be distinguished: neuropsychological and psychological-pedagogical.

Minor deviations in the functioning of the nervous system, called minimal brain dysfunctions, are a variant of normal development. According to the data available today, the number of children with MMD is increasing and currently accounts for up to 30% of the total number of students.

The most common learning difficulties include:

• reduced efficiency, fluctuations in attention, memory weakness, insufficient speech formation;
• insufficient development of programming and control functions;
• visual-spatial difficulties;
• difficulties in processing auditory (auditory-speech) information;
• difficulties in processing visual (visual-speech) information.

The most widespread problems are the decrease in working capacity, increased fatigue and exhaustion of children. Increased motivation, care for the rest of children, and a well-thought-out system of educational tasks contribute to reducing fatigue. However, these accepted methods of pedagogical support of the child in some cases turn out to be ineffective, and then we have to state the presence of school difficulties due to pronounced unevenness in the development of higher mental functions.

The only way out in such a situation is developmental-correctional training, which is based on two principles:

• principle of work in the zone of proximal development;
• weak link principle.

Zone of Proximal Development is determined by the content of those tasks that the child cannot solve on his own, but which are available to him with the help of an adult, i.e., this is what a child today knows how to do with the help of an adult, and tomorrow he can do it on his own.

Zone of actual development is determined by those tasks that the child can perform on his own, without the help of an adult, that is, this is what he can do.

The teacher takes on the functions of the weak link, gradually transferring them to the child. To this end, he builds educational tasks "from simple to complex" and gives the child a hint. Tasks should be adequate to the child's abilities: equally useless and too easy, and too difficult tasks.

Such individually-oriented training can be realized only with the interaction of a teacher and a psychologist. If the psychological diagnosis of the school psychologist causes difficulties, you must contact the medical-psychological-pedagogical center. Incorrectly selected diagnostic methods and erroneous qualification of the data obtained will slow down the work on correcting school difficulties.

The difficulties experienced by children in learning are due to a violation in the development of the corresponding blocks of the brain.

First block- energy - maintains the necessary tone of the cortex, which is necessary in order to proceed successfully, firstly, the processes of obtaining and processing information, and secondly, the processes of forming programs and monitoring their implementation.

Second block- receiving, processing and storing information.

Third block- programming of behavior, regulation and control over the course of mental activity.

In accordance with the blocks of the brain indicated above, three main groups of school difficulties are distinguished.

The work of the first block of the brain ensures the general tone of the cortex. If this unit fails, it becomes difficult for the child to maintain an optimal level of activity.

Among these children, hyperactive and hypoactive children are distinguished. Hyperactive children have increased activity of these parts of the brain, while hypoactive children have decreased activity.

hyperactive children stand out noticeably among their peers. Even if there is only one such child in the class, he cannot help but attract attention, both teachers and classmates. Such children are mobile, emotional, easily distracted themselves by minor stimuli and distract their classmates. Difficulties associated with the assimilation of educational material are experienced to a greater extent by hyperactive schoolchildren who have a violation of voluntary attention - in this case, we are talking about a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, i.e. hyperactive children who have preserved attention functions differ only in their behavior, which causes a lot of trouble for teachers and parents, however, as a rule, school performance does not suffer.

Hypoactive children slowly enter the working state, quickly get tired. They turn out to be productive in the first half of the lesson, and in the second they get distracted and even “turn off”. An analysis of their written work shows that they are not always able to complete the educational task, they make many mistakes, which tend to increase towards the end of the task.

The teacher often has great difficulty trying to increase the activity of the child.

It is possible to single out those activities that will help increase the overall performance of children:

• attention to the organizational side of the lesson;
• change of activities, avoidance of monotony in work;
• increasing motivation by including elements of the game and competition in the lesson, organizing work in groups;
• conducting physical exercises, performing movements for attention;
• control over the results of assimilation at the beginning, end and middle of the lesson: it is possible that children will be able to correctly answer the question after some time break.

The main thing that the teacher should pay attention to is the inadmissibility of monotony in work, which can lead to a decrease in efficiency.

The second block of the brain associated with the reception, processing and storage of information received by a person. In case of difficulty in processing information, reading and writing suffer. Pedagogical correction should be carried out in elementary school. However, such areas of work as increasing vocabulary and developing auditory memory remain relevant throughout the entire school education. A lot of problems that have not been solved in elementary school persist in secondary school, causing difficulties in mastering educational material. Children who have difficulty processing visual-spatial information make a large number of errors.

in written work in Russian and mathematics, but they can give good oral answers. The main reason for the problems experienced by children is the difficulties associated with operating spatial information and finding a strategy for its processing. This causes a slow mastery of holistic reading.

The third block of the human brain carries out programming, regulation and control of active human activity. Conscious human activity only begins with the receipt and processing of information, then there is the formation of intentions, the development of an appropriate program of actions and their implementation in external (motor) or internal (mental) acts. This requires a special apparatus that could create and hold the necessary intentions, develop action programs, carry them out and constantly monitor ongoing actions, comparing the effect of the action being performed with the original intention.

Children with a lag in the functions of programming and activity control are either characterized by increased activity - they are restless, stretching their hand without listening to the end of the question, or by inhibition - in this case, the children are slow and lethargic. If, when the first block of the brain is malfunctioning, children suffer from the fact that they are not able to maintain an optimal level of wakefulness and either quickly turn off or are overly excited, then action planning suffers in violations caused by a malfunction of the third block of the brain. For example, when performing a grammatical task, it is difficult for children with impaired cortical tone to start its implementation, and children with control difficulties jump from one task to another.

All children with a lag in control actions are easily distracted, slip into a simplified version of the action, hardly complete the action, do not compare the result of the action with a model or plan. They make many mistakes due to the simplification of programs and pathological inertia. According to the data obtained, this is based on the difficulties of switching and avoiding the stereotyped response, and a decrease in the amount of working memory. Such children are equally unsuccessful in the performance of all educational tasks, but the solution of mental problems suffers more than others.

School failures cause a negative reaction among teachers and parents, which further reduces learning motivation, which leads to an even greater backlog in learning. In this case, they are often ready to take on the role of a jester, which can subsequently lead to antisocial behavior.

The main corrective method with such children is work with materialized external supports, while a gradual step-by-step transition is made from a joint extended action with an adult to independent, collapsed internal actions. It is recommended to observe the following rules:

• organize the student's workplace;
• include the “attention!” sign in the work;
• write a lesson plan on the board;
• present a complex instruction in stages with its obligatory repetition;
• use visual teaching methods.

Thus, we see that some difficulties in mastering the school curriculum are connected not with the fact that the student does not want to study well, but with the fact that he cannot quickly and easily assimilate school knowledge due to the peculiarities of the development and maturation of brain regions. . Any child wants to be successful, but not everyone succeeds, at least without significant additional effort. And if there are no “fives” and “fours” expected and approved by adults, then the student’s interest in learning sharply decreases. And the task of teachers and psychologists is to see these individual features of the functioning of the brain structures of poorly performing schoolchildren and develop forms and methods of work that will help them compensate for these shortcomings.

in development.

In conclusion, it must be emphasized once again that working with children with developmental disabilities involves providing them with individual psychological and pedagogical assistance.

At least two participants are involved in the educational process - a teacher and a student, and the reasons for the difficulties experienced by the child can be equally due to both the insufficiency of the student's efforts and the peculiarities of the training organized by the teacher. Often, school success, as well as failure, is associated primarily with the characteristics of the student's activity: if the student copes with homework and control tasks, answers at the blackboard, then this is his merit. Otherwise, they talk about a negligent student, whose characteristic consists of only “not”: inattentive, dependent, incapable, does not listen to the teacher; does not know how to work with a textbook, etc., which is usually explained by his unwillingness to learn, insufficient diligence, etc.

However, such an understanding of the causes of school problems, firstly, relieves the teacher of any responsibility for the results of his actions, and secondly, it makes it difficult to understand how one teacher differs from another and why in the same class the success of students in

different subjects can differ significantly. In the latter case, due to the fact that the criteria for assigning marks are very subjective, we are talking not only about academic performance, but also about the performances of children at olympiads and tournaments, their participation in school conferences, etc.

In this regard, the question arises about the role of the teacher in organizing the successful learning activities of the child. There is still an opinion in the pedagogical environment that the possibilities of a teacher are very limited, and the idea of ​​achieving one hundred percent literacy is nothing more than a myth invented by idealistic teachers who have no teaching experience. However, psychologists managed to prove that dreamer teachers are not so far from reality. Psychologists have convincingly shown that it is possible to organize such education that would lead to the leveling of academic performance when the general education program becomes available to all normally developing children. There is a leveling off. Achievement, not ability.

Traditional teaching involves control mainly by the end result, which the student comes to feel. Therefore, it was relevant to clarify "the conditions under which the student will act in the way "as it should" and will inevitably come to predetermined results. Such a system was called the systematically phased formation of mental actions and concepts and included four large groups of conditions:

• formation of adequate motivation for the student's actions;
• ensuring the correct execution of the new action;
• cultivating its desired properties (an action can be performed at different speeds, in full operations or be reduced, etc.)
• the formation of an action in the desired form (it can be performed in a material, verbal or mental form).

Thanks to this organization of the learning process, a new action is formed much faster and easier than with traditional forms of learning. However, it is well known that not all training meets these requirements. Therefore, three types of teaching are distinguished, each of which is distinguished by “its own orientation in the subject, its own course of the learning process, the quality of its results and the attitude of children to the process and subject of learning”.

I type of teaching. With this type of teaching, not all the guidelines necessary for the correct performance of the action are given. The teacher, as it were, means that the student can think of some of the simplest things himself. This lack of reference leads to much trial and error. The student focuses on the final product, and the conditions, the observance of which leads to the desired result, often remain hidden from him. As a result, the correct action occurs by chance, and the student himself finds it difficult to repeat the correct decision. Such learning is not accompanied by cognitive motivation; interest in learning remains external, not connected in any way with the acquisition of knowledge. A student studies in order to get a good mark, brag to his classmates, etc. Most children studying according to type I study accumulate narrow subject knowledge and skills. The development of thinking and abilities occurs, as it were, in addition to training. A lecture presented by a teacher in finished form can teach a lot, but it only brings up the ability and desire, without doing anything and without checking, to use everything from someone else's hands.

Type II training involves obtaining complete guidelines for a particular action in finished form, which practically eliminates trial and error. The systematic education of the desired properties allows you to achieve the intended results without a significant spread in academic performance. A significant disadvantage of type II teaching is that it is based on the characteristics of individual specific objects, and the transfer to new objects or new conditions is limited by their external similarity. However, the main disadvantage of this type of teaching is the formation in students of an attitude towards ready-made knowledge, and not towards the discovery of the unknown, which brings up not meaningful, but applied interest in knowledge.

When training according to type III the object is revealed not in isolation and not only in its difference from others, but as a particular phenomenon of the general system. The orientation scheme is compiled as a result of a preliminary independent study of objects in this area. The child's mastery of the research method opens up unlimited prospects, just as cognizable reality itself is unlimited. Again, the parallel suggests itself that "for today's education it is not so important to teach a certain amount of knowledge as to cultivate the ability to acquire this knowledge and use it." The main thing in the III type of teaching is the excitation of cognitive activity, the strengthening and development of cognitive interest, which results in the exclusion of other types of motivation.

Thus, when learning according to type I, there is no positive relationship between learning and mental development, and mental development not only does not depend on learning, but, on the contrary, determines its capabilities. When training according to type II, the influence of training on mental development is also not found. And only in the third type of teaching is there an effect of general development, which manifests itself not only in the distribution of learned techniques to sections of the same subject, but also in various forms of intellectual activity.

Based on these theoretical provisions, it is possible to develop a system of requirements for the organization of the process of assimilation of school knowledge. There is no doubt that the main efforts should be directed to the creation of a third type of doctrine. However, it should be borne in mind that this implies a fundamentally different approach to the content of training courses. As an example, we can cite the results of a study by M. Ya. Mikulinskaya, devoted to experimental teaching of the correct placement of punctuation marks in the Russian language. She analyzed the rules and showed that each of them performs one of three functions: connection, separation, or selection. Instead of memorizing separate rules, she taught children to recognize situations of connection, separation, and separation, and then showed punctuation marks to implement each of these functions. All students learned to punctuate almost accurately.

Building an education system that meets these requirements requires a lot of time and effort, so you should pay attention to those features of the content and methods of teaching that, even under conditions of traditional education, will help prevent school failure.

The minds and souls of scientists and practitioners have long been concerned about the problem "Why teach?" in deciding which they were unanimous in the main: the task of the school is to prepare children for adulthood. The task of the secondary school is not to teach, but to develop children, not to stuff their heads with useless ballast, but to prepare them for the life into which they must enter as mature people. A mature person is one who knows why he lives, how he relates to people and to the history of mankind, and acts according to this.

What to teach? What kind of school should be so that education and upbringing provide preparation for the future life? The main value of the entire education system lies in its ability to discover, form, and strengthen the individual values ​​of education in their pupils. It is known that nothing can be taught to anyone, you can only learn ...

If for centuries the main social task of mass education was to transfer general cultural knowledge and skills (to write, count, read), then in the current conditions such an orientation is “completely insufficient both for mastering the true spirit of modern science and the principles of a creative attitude to reality.”

Renovation of our school education should be aimed primarily at the priority in it of all forms of education of the student's personality, which themselves can act in it as genuine subjects of their activity. Thus, education is not limited to the accumulation of a sum of knowledge, it should be aimed at the formation of a creative attitude to the world around us, the ability to live and act.

according to constantly changing conditions. At the heart of such a skill, in our opinion, is a comprehensive orientation in the world and oneself. Hence, the extremely general formulation of the task of schooling can be presented as the task of forming in students a broad social orientation in all spheres of life around them.

The urgency of solving this problem is reflected in the Federal State Educational Standards IEO and LLC. Thus, the Federal State Educational Standard establishes requirements not only for subject results, but also for meta-subject and personal ones. The content of subject education is the factor that has a significant impact on school performance. Lessons that are not interesting for the child not only hinder the acquisition of knowledge in certain areas, but also form a negative attitude towards both a separate academic subject and the school as a whole, or, even worse, education and Knowledge in general. The opposite is also true: it is possible to build education in such a way that topics from physics or history that were traditionally considered boring cease to be such, and as a result, students master the relevant subject knowledge.

Thus, the prevention of school failure contribute to:

• mastering children with interdisciplinary knowledge;
• a clear allocation of the subject of the studied science; one cannot teach rationally if the subject itself is presented unintelligently.
• the quality of possession of basic information from all academic subjects is determined by the ratio of specific and general, non-specific actions to be mastered. If specific actions are the allocation of the main members of the sentence, the declension of nouns

etc. - first of all, they are determined by the characteristics of the subject area under study, then general actions - subsuming under the concept, comparison and classification, derivation of the consequence - are used in solving various educational problems. Schoolchildren's mastery of common actions has a positive effect on the success of subsequent education. This instills in them the ability to independently compose a complete orienting basis for a specific objective action, on the psychological characteristics of which, as we have already seen, the quality of solving educational problems depends. Working with a textbook assumes that high school students have the skills to work with text, since the material to be learned is relatively new for students, and it is not enough to learn it.

How to teach? This question is closely related to the previous question What to teach? At the same time, it is useful to pay attention to some features of the organization of assimilation, insufficient consideration of which hinders the acquisition of subject knowledge by children and is one of the causes of school failure.

First. One of the undoubted merits of psychologists is their conclusion that for successful learning it is not enough to give a sample of the action product, it is also necessary to equip the student with a model of action to obtain a given product. In other words, it is necessary to show the child what and in what sequence he must do to get the result. At the same time, it is necessary not only to show, but also to explain why it is necessary to act in this way. This is called the scheme of the orienting basis of action, which is acquired step by step in the course of specially organized training. The teacher is faced with the task of tracking how the child gets the given result - for this, the student, performing the exercise, must tell what operations and in what sequence he performs. The transition to performing the task in the mind is possible only when the teacher has made sure that the student performs all the operations and in the right sequence.

A typical school situation is when a teacher, faced with students misunderstanding the topic of the lesson, repeats the same explanation, at best in slow motion. As a rule, this does not lead to success, which is still expressed in a large number of errors in solving educational problems. The reason for the observed phenomenon lies in the fact that the instructions of the teacher were inaccessible to the children, and remain so for the children precisely because they do not understand how to perform this or that action. For example, a teacher presents a sample of work with the rule of the Russian language, but children, even if the rule is in front of their eyes, make mistakes. This is due to the fact that no one taught the student how to work with the rule, as if it goes without saying that he is able to use the algorithm proposed to him. In practice, it turns out that one rule is clearly not enough and it is necessary to teach the student to work in accordance with this and other models. Such work should begin as early as possible, from the first years of schooling. In the case when it turns out that the student has not formed all the components of the action, it is possible to carry out targeted correction aimed at compensating for the missing, previously missed forms of those actions that students must master.

Second. The explanation of the educational material is followed by its development on educational tasks of varying degrees of complexity. Thus, the process of teaching all academic subjects is organized, but the sequence of presentation of training tasks in terms of their complexity may be different. The work of the teacher in the zone of proximal development of the child significantly increases the cognitive activity of the latter and thereby stimulates him to solve a new type of problem.

Conventionally, teachers can be divided into two groups: those working in the zone of actual and the zone of proximal development of the child.

Outwardly, it looks like this. One teacher, after explaining the new material, begins to work it out with the simplest tasks available to all children. Another teacher, after explaining, presents difficult tasks that they cope with

not all students. Most teachers work according to the first strategy. It turned out that in those rare cases when the teacher focuses on the zone of proximal development of children, they, firstly, feel more confident, and, secondly, they are much more willing to take on new tasks and, as a result, more often achieve a positive result.

In other words, it is desirable to present such tasks that would be, on the one hand, available to the student, and on the other hand, would not contribute to his feeling that "he already knows and can do everything." Such training prevents the appearance of intellectual passivity, which will be discussed below. Thus constructed training is focused on the immediate (zone of proximal development), and not the actual development of the student.

Third. The student learns the educational material not only in the course of the teacher's explanation at school, but also through homework. However, due attention is not always paid to the selection of homework assignments, which is especially true in relation to the so-called "oral" subjects. If for “written” subjects the student receives assignments for each lesson that are checked by a conscientious teacher (which is also not enough, since it is necessary to understand the reasons for erroneous performance), and thus regular control is ensured, then with “oral” subjects everything is different. The student has the opportunity to demonstrate how much he has learned the material, only a few times during the quarter, when he is called to the board. In addition, control or independent work is carried out, which is not so regular and numerous in comparison with such subjects as mathematics or the Russian language. In this regard, special attention should be paid to what tasks the child must complete at home, which is true for all academic subjects.

In the practice of school education, as observations show, insufficient attention is paid precisely to the formulation of homework, as a result of which the student understands his duties as follows: solve problems in mathematics, do exercises in Russian and foreign languages, read a paragraph on history, geography and other "oral » items. The consequence of this understanding is, at a minimum, the following:

• written tasks are performed without relying on rules that exist, as it were, separately from exercises and equations;
• tasks are completed according to the scheme proposed in the lesson, often without a sufficient understanding of its essence, which causes the student's inability to solve educational problems presented in a form other than in the lesson;
• textbook materials are indeed read, but without any consequences in the sense that they are not included in the solution of educational tasks - as a result of such training, children cannot generalize the subject material, since they do not have the grounds for such a generalization;
• individual sections of the textbook do not form a whole, there are no ideas about the scientific field as a whole.

When listing the exercises that the student should do and the paragraphs that need to be read, it is advisable for the teacher not to limit himself to naming the numbers of exercises or paragraphs. It should be clear to the student how he should perform the exercises in terms of correlation with the rule, how to solve equations - focusing only on a sample solution in the class or on the rule as a whole, how to work with a paragraph - it is hardly easy to read.

Until now, in our lectures, we have dealt with children who experience difficulties in mastering the school curriculum. Among them there are those who cannot cope with the curriculum for quite objective reasons, and there are those who do not want to: as practice shows, it is very difficult to distinguish one from the other, and often schoolchildren with attention disorders are classified as lazy and vice versa. Such children are usually talked about at teachers' councils, special classes are held with them, they are given assignments for the summer, they used to be left for the second year, but at the present time the institution of repetition is slowly dying out.

Against the background of chronically underachieving children, the rest of the students are perceived by all participants in the educational process as very prosperous and therefore do not need any special attention from teachers, let alone psychologists. Even those who cannot boast of good grades and belong to the category of average students do not cause much concern among teachers, except perhaps for parents who do not want to put up with the absence of fives and fours in their children's diaries. The only thing that worries vigilant teachers is the decline in academic performance, but this is often attributed to an increase in workload or the emergence of interests that lie outside the school. Both, indeed, take place, which, however, does not relieve the school of responsibility for learning outcomes and forces us to look for reasons for not very high school success and ways to change the current situation.

And it seems quite strange to pose the problem of the so-called motivated children. Teachers and psychologists are well aware of the request coming from the school administration about the need for an attentive and caring attitude towards motivated children. Initially, the question is bewildering: do children who are already all right need some special attention? However, gradually, as one penetrates into school life, it becomes clear that the idea of ​​these children as very prosperous is not entirely correct. It is not in vain that teachers are sounding the alarm: outwardly successful and balanced, they turn out to be very vulnerable to rapidly and very unpredictably changing learning conditions. This is manifested not only in the loss of interest in learning, but also in a decrease in reader activity, a radical change in cognitive aspirations, increasing difficulties in communicating with classmates, etc.

All of the above leads to the need to understand those motivating forces that determine not only the attitude of schoolchildren to their academic duties, but also the results of schooling in general.

Before talking about the problems of motivated children, it would be nice to have an idea of ​​who we are talking about in this case. This term is purely pedagogical, to say the least - school, it has become quite firmly established in the professional everyday life of teachers, especially those who have to take care of preparing students for olympiads and various types of competitions, preparing them to participate in children's conferences. In psychology, such a special concept does not exist, since it is known that any activity is stimulated by some motive, and the absence of a motive means the absence of activity. And in this sense, all children can be called motivated - they are all busy with their studies, although with varying degrees of success. Another thing is that the motives underlying educational activities are very diverse and, moreover, they can be hidden even from the student himself, and even more so from the adults around him.

There are three types of motivation: external, competitive and internal.

For external motivation it is characteristic that the true motives for learning lie in a wide social life, and the child learns not for the sake of the process of learning and gaining knowledge, but for the sake of getting marks, praise from parents and teachers. The situation with homework is very indicative in this respect. Often a student does homework in order to avoid punishment for what has not been done, which is why children quickly “figure out” that one teacher must complete the assignments - otherwise there will be deuces in the diary and journal, and the other turns to the work done at home from case by case. Also, often students have high final scores due to the fact that the teacher is ready to compensate for the lack of marks in the journal by evaluating homework. Such tactics of the teacher's behavior reinforces the external motivation of the student, setting him up, first of all, for the pursuit of grades, and interest in knowledge itself in this case inexorably falls. That is why homework should be only a means of monitoring the student's work learning activities, but by no means a source of their objective evaluation.

School teachers often have to deal with children who are able to cope with tasks designed for the material they have just studied, and questions on a recently studied topic take them by surprise and, moreover, cause offense. As a weighty argument in their favor, they bring a convincing, from their point of view, argument that they were not asked to repeat past topics. The situation is also well known when a student who missed a week or two due to a banal cold tries to avoid doing control work or answer at the blackboard, referring to his temporary absence. It would hardly be right in this case to insist on one's own, to demand from the student the immediate completion of educational tasks. Once in this position, the student will look for - and successfully find - a way out of the situation: write off, use a hint, etc., which only enhances the effect of external motivation. Correct in all respects will be the observance of the school rule, according to which children who missed classes have the opportunity to write a test later. It should be noted that not all students are determined to write the work on time, but at least some of them will not delay it until the end of the quarter, and then it is possible that studying the material for a pragmatic purpose will acquire a different meaning.

As for the external motivation of the teaching, it is naive to expect that it will cease to be such in an instant, but care must be taken not to reinforce it.

"Sports" or competitive motivation characterized by the desire to obtain the result that the student needs, raises him in his own eyes, in the eyes of his classmates, because he managed to achieve some high results compared to his previous successes. The student strives to improve his performance, but at the same time, knowledge itself does not interest him, he is focused only on the final result. From a psychological point of view, this type of motivation is external, however, distinguishing it as an independent one is explained by the fact that such motivation allows the student to strive to achieve high learning outcomes. In school practice, it is not uncommon for a student, initially focused only on the external side of the learning process - winning an Olympiad, entering a university or gaining long-awaited respect from classmates, penetrates so deeply into the basics of a particular field of scientific knowledge that he begins to be interested in it already. for her own sake.

Finally, intrinsic motivation is actually cognitive motivation, which is distinguished by a disinterested and insatiable passion for knowledge. Such students in the school

a little, and teachers can not help but pay attention to them. Among them there are children who are interested in not one but several academic subjects: they are equally attracted to history and biology, linguistics and probability theory. Others, on the contrary, are ready to spend hours looking for information related to one area, about which educators often have only a very general idea. And the teacher should not forget about those and others: otherwise, the first ones may get lost and ultimately be unable to make a choice in favor of one or another kind of professional occupation, and the second ones - so dig in that it will be difficult for them to cope with the educational program for other subjects.

It should also be specially noted that the presence of intrinsic motivation is not always accompanied by high academic performance: often in children - which is typical for younger adolescents - there is a persistent cognitive interest that does not need any external reinforcements.

We have already talked about different types of learning, each of which has its own specific kind of motivation.

With type I teaching“interest in the subject and process of learning is not fed by their knowledge and remains external - the child learns for the sake of something else, which determines the direction and stability of the teaching.”

Due to the fact that school education is predominantly built according to type I, in which the main attention is paid to the presentation of ready-made, not always well-systematized knowledge, and the motivation of our students is, as a rule, external. In this case, the teacher usually does not set himself the task of inducing the student to self-derivation of knowledge, but is limited to presenting the information necessary, taking into account the requirements of the school curriculum.

II type of teaching“gradually brings up a certain attitude to the subject and the process of learning. The activity of the student is directed not to the discovery of the unknown, but to the assimilation of “ready knowledge” - the II type of teaching brings up not theoretical, cognitive, but applied interest in knowledge. home distinguishing feature Such learning consists in the fact that the teacher transmits in a generalized form a fairly large amount of information that in the near future can be used in solving various educational problems. This training gives good results, but does not contribute to the emergence of interest in knowledge as such: the student receives all the necessary information from the teacher, and he does not have to take care of obtaining them on his own.

III type of teaching significantly differs from the two previous ones - and first of all, the nature of the motivation that accompanies it. “... the first and most important thing in the III type of teaching is the excitation of cognitive activity, the ever-increasing strengthening and development of cognitive interest proper. And this requires the exclusion of other types of motivation, in particular, rewards or punishments. And failures should be treated in such a way as not to discourage the child, but to encourage him to search for new solutions.

In the III type of teaching, two principles are clearly distinguished: the method of researching objects and the method of involvement in this research. If the method of research is aimed at clarifying the basic structure of the objects under study, then the method of involvement in the study consists in arousing cognitive interest. This initial cognitive interest must be carefully and carefully, but at the same time consistently and persistently deployed, embodied in a stable, independent activity that carries a sequence of tasks. Only self-made "discoveries" reinforce interest in the studied subject area. The knowledge that the child receives should be interesting to him, their acquisition should be based on cognitive interest. Type III teaching meets this requirement.

As practice shows, children often study for the sake of their parents' praise and good grades, or in order not to be a black sheep among their classmates. The knowledge itself and the learning process are not very interesting for them, the result is important to them. Only a very small number of students are focused on obtaining knowledge, have a pronounced cognitive motivation - it is they who are called motivated in the pedagogical environment. They are willing and usually able to study well. Such students can be called eccentrics, because no other motivation can replace this passionate desire for knowledge.

There are few motivated children, and the school administration rightly believes that such wealth should be cherished and cherished. First-graders go to school for knowledge, but in fact, many of them are guided by the external attributes of school life, allowing them to approach the world of adults. Ideally, by the end of their stay in primary school, they should have formed learning activities with a pronounced cognitive motive. In practice, everything is different - most children go to school "because everyone goes", and some even develop a negative attitude towards the school as a whole, which they extend to the process of acquiring knowledge.

Concerned teachers turn their eyes towards psychologists in the hope of getting qualified help, but in this case, psychological methods themselves are not enough, correction of the content (what to teach?) and methods (how to teach?) of training is needed.

Observations of motivated children have shown that they are very different from each other. First of all, age features are striking. Motivated fifth- and sixth-graders study well, accurately perform all the tasks of the teacher. They always know what topic is being studied and when the test is expected. Expressed interest in any one subject area is an exceptional phenomenon. They have favorite subjects, which, as a rule, is determined by their attitude towards the teacher. The cognitive motive is very broad: they are equally interested in why it is impossible to divide by zero, and why in Russian and English language different number of letters. At this age, children are sensitive to marks. They hope that their work will be properly appreciated, and they put a lot of effort into achieving the desired excellent result.

By the end of the 6th grade, the picture is changing. Firstly, the tendency to highlight the range of interests, although initially very vague, becomes obvious. Children are not yet able to specifically identify the subject area that is most attractive to them, but they can already say for sure what they are not interested in. Some give a clear preference to the humanities, others - to mathematics, others are clearly drawn to nature. However, they can be equally successful in all school subjects.

Secondly, motivated children sometimes strive for knowledge itself, and not for evaluation for demonstrated results. They can possess a large amount of information on a particular subject and at the same time have satisfactory marks. In the circle of their peers, they often talk about the facts that surprised them, in the classroom they make vivid messages and reports, surprising teachers with the amount of information not even processed, but learned. At the same time, they sometimes do not make any efforts to answer all the questions of the test. One eighth-grader actively helped to understand computers not only to classmates, but also to older children, having good reason for that, since he had read at least a dozen books on programming, but in computer science he could not earn above three in any way.

Perhaps the main danger that awaits the school when meeting with such children is that they may remain unnoticed by the teacher. There is nothing left but to advise subject teachers to deal with the causes of weak answers.

in each specific case. The subsequent orientation of students towards achievements is the subject of joint work of the teacher, parents and psychologist. Appealing to parents is highly desirable, since they have a disorganizing, demotivating effect on the child both when they expect only high results from him, and when they are completely removed from participation in his school affairs.

During the transition to high school, teenagers are forced to decide professionally. Motivated high school students often find themselves in an advantageous position compared to undecided classmates who do not have a pronounced interest. As a rule, by this age, motivated teenagers not only possess knowledge, but also know how to correctly demonstrate it - they are no longer indifferent to how they appear before teachers and classmates. Moreover, by presenting the information available to them, they are able to reasonably defend their point of view. in the latter case, for the sake of scientific truth, they are ready to go into conflict with a teacher who is not very respected. A wise teacher will find a way to relieve tension - it is not worth proving that the teacher is always right: most likely, a meticulous teenager has dug to the very depths and is ready for further exploits in this field. It will be more useful in all respects to support the cognitive interest of a teenager, from time to time referring to his authoritative opinion.

Pedagogical support for cognitive motivation Obviously, work with motivated children cannot be the same throughout the school years. Growing up, children change, and, perhaps, the main task of the teacher and psychologist is to recognize these changes, to distinguish the declared motives from the real ones. This difficult task can be successfully solved only if psychologists do not limit themselves to questionnaires, but turn to observing the behavior of children in the classroom, analyzing their written work, and also find time to conduct a confidential conversation with the child.

As for correctional work, at present psychologists cannot boast of ready-made programs for the formation of cognitive motivation, the appearance of which is more a natural result than the goal of pedagogical work. Cognitive motivation arises in the process of cognition itself, the acquisition of knowledge, and therefore cannot be introduced from outside. A child can be forced to learn by appealing to a sense of duty and responsibility, but how to make this process interesting in itself? The desire to learn, the thirst for knowledge presuppose a change in school education, and above all its content. This is what supporters of developmental education are constantly talking about, according to which the mastery of theoretical knowledge is a means of forming internal motives for learning.

However, the majority of children study in ordinary public schools according to traditional programs and standard textbooks. They will be discussed.

Firstly, motivated children, having studied very well in primary and secondary school, as a rule, are able to quickly and easily assimilate the school curriculum, which in itself can be assessed unambiguously positively. The reverse side of this is a decrease in their activity. Experienced teachers notice that they stop learning. At the same time, outwardly, everything may look very good, since they still do much better than their peers, and a small decrease in academic performance may well be attributed to the emergence of extracurricular interests. Such teenagers easily and quickly understand new material and in the future do not bother themselves with a deeper penetration into it.

One such left-handed girl managed to write down formulas in a mathematics lesson with one hand, and play tic-tac-toe with her neighbor with the other. From a straight A student, she turned into a good student, which did not particularly bother anyone: neither herself - the joy from the fives was replaced by an indifferent attitude to success, nor the teachers, who, understandably, are concerned about poor students. It was the latter that was one of the reasons for this behavior of the girl: she became bored of listening to the same explanation several times. In this case, it helped that in the 10th grade the girl chose special courses and individual projects that corresponded to her interests and level of development.

Thus, subject teachers face two tasks: firstly, to pay attention to children who are initially interested in gaining knowledge, but gradually losing this interest, and, secondly, to find ways to encourage them to update existing information and search for new ones. . However, unfortunately, teachers who are preoccupied with pulling up the underachievers often do not get their hands on their gifted, formerly motivated, classmates. It is necessary to explain for a long time and monotonously that everyone should be comfortable at school, including motivated children, who, for example, can be given more complex tasks.

Secondly, there are children with a pronounced cognitive interest, but at the same time they are not inclined to use the accumulated wealth for pragmatic purposes - they have already been discussed above. In this case, special conversations on the formation of successful behavior, in other words, achievement motivation, may be useful. The question of who should organize such conversations remains open: it can be the teacher himself, and the psychologist, and the administrator, the main requirement is his authority in the eyes of a teenager. Especially effective are such conversations with high school students who are already focused on mastering a profession, which means they are ready to demonstrate their abilities and even some superiority compared to others. However, the excessive efforts of the teacher in this field can have the opposite result, when a teenager who believes in his “special” abilities will be in the grip of one desire - to prove to everyone around him and to himself his own exclusivity. There will be no time or energy left for further advancement in mastering the scientific foundations.

As for younger children - students of grades 5-7, they are deprived of vanity, they often refuse to participate in olympiads, do not strive to show themselves in a favorable light in front of their classmates. Observational data indicate that reinforcement of a child's successful performance at a conference or olympiad will be useful. Support from adults, whose opinion he values ​​very much, can be effective. It is important for a teenager to feel that his parents and younger siblings are proud of him, and teachers respect him and see him as a worthy companion.

Summing up, it should be noted that when working with such adolescents it is not possible to give advice that is equally suitable for all children, but perhaps the main difficulty lies in the fact that the problem itself often remains hidden. Teachers, as a rule, are worried about underachieving students, and the children themselves are not worried either about the decline in academic performance - and so they study no worse than most other students, or in connection with the appearance of unwillingness to do homework. However - and this primarily applies to subject teachers - one should pay attention not only to absolute, but also to relative indicators of school success. Otherwise, the current children who cope with the school curriculum will join the ranks of difficult and problematic ones. Internal cognitive motivation from rough treatment with it can easily turn into its opposite and become external.

Literature

1. Akhutina T.V., Pylaeva N.M. overcoming learning difficulties: a neuropsychological approach. SPb.: Peter, 2008.

2. Bozhovich L.I. Personality and its formation at school age. SPb.: Peter, 2008.

3. Galperin P.Ya. Lectures on psychology. M .: Book house "University": graduate School, 2002.

4. Galperin P.Ya. Teaching methods and mental development of the child. M.: Publishing house Moscow. un-ta, 1985.

5. Vygotsky L.S. pedagogical psychology. M.: Pedagogy, 1991.

6. Davydov V.V. Lectures on educational psychology. M.: Academy, 2006.

7. Korchak J. Selected pedagogical works. M.: Pedagogy, 1979.

8. Elkonin D.B. Selected psychological works. M.: peda-

State public educational institution of the Leningrad region
“Boarding school implementing adapted educational programs, "Red Dawns"
"The main factors
influencing the success of schooling» Topic: Factors affecting school performance: psychological and pedagogical factor.
Done: teacher
Melnikova V.A.
St. Petersburg
2016
Content
1. Introduction.
2. Factors affecting school performance.
3.Psychological - pedagogical factors.
4. Education and mental development.
5. Mental development and quality of knowledge acquisition.
6. Mental development and school performance.
7. Didactic and methodological system of school education.
8. Conclusion.
9. Literature.
Weak children are not ugly, but the most fragile, the most tender
flowers in the infinitely varied flower garden of humanity.
V. A. Sukhomlinsky
Introduction
Meaning school period human life is difficult to overestimate. Much in a person's life depends on how it develops - successfully or unsuccessfully, including many personal qualities that are formed under the influence and as a result of certain features of the school period of a person's life.
Many of the problems of an adult can be better understood by looking at his years of schooling. It’s not even a matter of whether a person studied successfully or unsuccessfully, but how comfortable he felt at school, whether he went to school with a desire every day, how his relationship with teachers and classmates developed. It is under the influence of these circumstances that certain personal qualities are formed. In many ways, this depends not so much on the student himself, but on what the school process itself is, how it is organized, and how society sees the goals and objectives of schooling.
It is known that schoolchildren, despite the same programs and conditions of education and upbringing at school, have unequal knowledge, different performance indicators. Progress as a concept means the degree of success of students in mastering knowledge, the school curriculum.
School performance is an important criterion for evaluating a child as a person by adults and peers. The role of academic achievement in the development of the student is huge! The relevance of this problem has always been and will be significant for students, teachers and parents.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the school period of a person's life. Much in a person's life depends on how it develops - successfully or unsuccessfully, including many personal qualities that are formed under the influence and as a result of certain features of the school period of a person's life. Many of the problems of an adult can be better understood by looking at his years of schooling. It’s not even a matter of whether a person studied successfully or unsuccessfully, but how comfortable he felt at school, whether he went to school with a desire every day, how his relationship with teachers and classmates developed. It is under the influence of these circumstances that certain personal qualities are formed. In many ways, this depends not so much on the student himself, but on what the school process itself is, how it is organized, and how society sees the goals and objectives of schooling.
It is known that from 15 to 40% of primary school students experience various difficulties in the process of schooling.
The teacher does not always have the opportunity to timely identify the causes of various kinds of difficulties in educational work with students of different ages, to overcome deviations in the intellectual and personal development of schoolchildren, to provide psychological assistance in solving conflict situations. According to the data obtained, the unreliability of this approach is manifested in the fact that approximately 60% of teachers, based only on their experience and knowledge of the student, indicated the causes of students' difficulties incorrectly, about 30% of teachers named them incompletely or partially incorrectly, and only 10% of the teachers surveyed correctly understood the reasons for the occurrence of certain difficulties of students. This confirms the idea that “by eye”, without the use of techniques and methods of psychodiagnostics, it is practically impossible to understand the psychological causes of certain difficulties in the educational activities of schoolchildren, and, consequently, to carry out effective corrective work. What causes learning difficulties for some children? It is known that all mental processes have a complex multicomponent structure and are based on the work of many brain structures, each of which makes its own specific contribution to their course. In this regard, each difficulty can occur with dysfunction of various parts of the brain, but in each of these cases it manifests itself in a specific way, qualitatively differing from the features of its manifestation with developmental deficiencies in other brain structures. “Weak”, insufficiently formed and fixed in preschool childhood components of mental functions are the most vulnerable in conditions requiring the mobilization of mental activity.
Factors affecting school performance

The study of relevant scientific data has made it possible to identify three main factors of academic achievement: the requirements for students arising from the goals of the school; psychophysical abilities of students; social conditions of their life, upbringing and education at school and outside of school.
The requirements for students form the basis for the development of tests and assessment criteria. The requirements of the content of education can only be met when they do not exceed the physical and mental capabilities of schoolchildren and are in accordance with the conditions for the education and upbringing of children.
In the capabilities of children, two closely related sides are distinguished - physical capabilities (the state of the body, its development) and mental (development of thinking, memory, imagination, perception, attention). When developing requirements for students, specialists in each academic subject are guided by a certain norm of the capabilities of children of a particular school age.
The psychophysical abilities of children change and improve under the influence of social conditions, including the influence of the educational work of the school. The content and methods of teaching increase (and sometimes delay, lower) the abilities of students.
Social conditions (in the broadest sense of the word) as a factor in academic achievement also interact with the abilities of children. These are the conditions in which children live, study, are brought up, living conditions, the cultural level of parents and environment, class occupancy, school equipment, teacher qualifications, availability and quality of educational literature, and much more. And this factor, one way or another, is taken into account when determining the content of training.
The same conditions of education and upbringing have a different effect on children brought up in different conditions, having differences in the body, in general development. Not only education, but the whole life of a child affects the formation of his personality, and personality development is not carried out under the influence of external conditions alone.
In determining the elements of poor progress, it is necessary to rely on didactic, methodological and psychological literature, using programs and textbooks, as well as the results of observations of pedagogical processes.
The most important task of pedagogical science is to reveal the essence of academic performance, to identify the structure of academic performance, the features by which its components can be identified, and the development of scientifically based methods for detecting these features. Without this, it is impossible to scientifically study the factors of academic failure and develop measures to combat it.
The modern explanatory dictionary of pedagogy defines academic performance as the degree of assimilation of knowledge, skills, abilities established by the curriculum, in terms of their completeness, depth, consciousness and strength. Finds its external expression in the estimated scores. Comparative data of grades in individual subjects characterize the progress in each academic subject, in the cycle of subjects, in classes or in the school as a whole. High student achievement is achieved by a system of didactic methods, forms and means, as well as educational measures.
It is necessary to proceed from the fact that the content of education prescribed for the school is expressed not only in programs and textbooks, but also in the literature explaining them. Methodical materials, programs and textbooks reveal the specific content of each subject and partially - the general principles and ideas underlying them. Psychological and pedagogical literature explains the goals and objectives of the new content, its features.
Psychological and pedagogical factors
A factor that significantly affects the success of children learning, and
consequently, their performance is also influenced by the psychological and pedagogical factor, the components of which are the age of the child (psychological readiness for schooling), who begins systematic education at school, and the didactic and methodological system within which schooling will be carried out.
Why does the age of a child starting school turn out to be closely related to his future school success or failure?
Only education that takes into account the psychological characteristics of the child, as well as the level of mental development he has achieved at the moment, can be effective. It is impossible to ignore this
since there is an internal logic of natural mental development, manifested in the acquisition of such properties and qualities that are the result of the interaction of external and internal. To violate it or not to reckon with its laws means to rudely interfere in the natural process, which will certainly lead to unpredictable
negative consequences. The great Ya. A. Comenius introduced into didactics the principle of conformity to nature, according to which the moment the child begins schooling must be precisely coordinated with the period of his best readiness for it. And such a period is the age of 6-7 years. Starting school at an earlier or later age
will not be as effective, will create a lot of difficulties for the child and will negatively affect learning outcomes.
The need to start schooling at a certain age is due, first of all, to the presence of sensitive periods in mental development, which create favorable conditions for the development of mental processes, which can then gradually or sharply weaken. Not to use these opportunities means to cause serious damage to the further mental development of the child. The early start of schooling (for example, at 5 years old, and for some children even at 6 years old) turns out to be ineffective due to the non-appearance of a period of special sensitivity to educational influences and therefore the need for them. That is why, as school practice shows, it is so difficult to teach too young children who hardly perceive what is easily given to children aged 6–7 years. But the beginning of schooling at a later age (8–9 years) is also not very successful, since the period of the child’s best susceptibility to learning influences has already passed, the perceiving “channels” have “closed”, and the child learns the material that was given with much more difficulty. It would be much easier for him if he started training at an earlier age.
L. S. Vygotsky (2002) attached great importance to the beginning of the process of schooling. He pointed to the existence of optimal terms for each type of training. And this means that only in certain age periods, teaching a given subject, given knowledge, skills and abilities is the easiest, most economical and fruitful. The beginning of the learning process should be linked to the maturation of those properties and functions that are necessary as prerequisites for this type of learning. But it would also be wrong to assume that the later appropriate instruction begins, the easier it should be given to the child, since the necessary prerequisites for instruction have reached a greater degree of maturity. Teaching too late is as little fruitful for the child as too early. Thus, a child who begins to learn to read and write at the age of 12 finds himself in unfavorable conditions and encounters such difficulties that he would not have encountered at an earlier start in learning this type of school skills. The point here, writes L. S. Vygotsky, is that learning relies not so much on already matured functions as on maturing ones. It is the period of maturation of the corresponding functions that is the most favorable period for the corresponding training.
What happens in reality, do parents, and even more so the school, always reckon with the laws of mental development and act in accordance with them so as not to harm the child? And now there is a desire of some parents to send their child to the first grade, who has not even reached the age of 6, and other parents - to delay the start of education in order to allegedly improve the child's starting opportunities.
Children admitted to school early experience significantly greater difficulties during their studies in primary school than their classmates who were admitted to the first grade later. But even delaying the start of schooling often does not have the expected beneficial effect. Here we can talk mainly about children of preschool age: the older the child, the less hope that such a delay will help to better prepare for schooling. Observations allow us to assert that the delay, although it protects against repetition in grades I and II, does not protect the child from the need to re-educate in one of the subsequent grades. It does not rule out a high probability of repetition already in grade III or IV. In addition, a suspension from school, even if it is temporary, can cause a child to have a negative attitude towards preschool.
Psychological readiness for school is formed throughout the entire preschool life of the child, and not only in the last preschool, or preschool, year. The school maturity of a child is a natural and inevitable result of his full-fledged living through the preschool period of development. This means, first of all, that the child must spend as much time in the preschool period of development as nature allots him for this in order to ensure his anatomical, physiological and psychological maturation, so that he is ready to move to another, higher level of his development. And this time is equal to 6-7 years. It has already been noted above that the early start of schooling, as a rule, harms the child. It is worth remembering the words of the great educator J.-J. Rousseau: “Nature wants children to be children before they become adults. If we want to break this order, we will produce early-ripening fruits that will have neither maturity nor taste and will not slow down to spoil ... Let childhood ripen in children. The main condition for the formation of psychological readiness for school is the full satisfaction of the needs of each child in the game. It is in the game, as you know, that all the cognitive processes of the child are formed, the ability to arbitrarily control their behavior, obeying the rules set by the game roles, all psychological neoplasms of the preschool period of development are formed and the prerequisites are laid for the transition to a new qualitative level of development. However, in life, especially in recent years, there is an alarming situation of psychological unpreparedness for a considerable number of children who come to study in the 1st grade. One of the reasons for this negative phenomenon is the fact that modern preschoolers not only play little, but also do not know how to play. Thus, a developed form of play takes place only in 18% of children in the preparatory group. kindergarten, and 36% of children in the preparatory group do not know how to play at all.
This distorts the normal path of mental development and negatively affects the formation of children's readiness for schooling. One of the reasons for this is the misunderstanding by parents and educators of the preparation of children for schooling. Instead of providing the child with the best conditions for the development of his play activity, adults, taking time away from play activities and artificially accelerating child development, teach him to write, read and count, that is, those learning skills that the child should master in the next period. age development.
Psychological readiness for school education does not consist in the child's learning skills of writing, reading and counting. But its necessary condition is the formation of the psychological prerequisites for educational activity. These prerequisites include the ability to analyze and copy a sample, the ability to perform tasks at the verbal direction of an adult, the ability to listen and hear, the ability to subordinate one's actions to a given system of requirements and control their implementation. Without these, at first glance, simple and even elementary, but basic psychological skills, training is impossible.
By the end of preschool age, the child begins to realize himself for the first time as a member of society, realizes his social position as a preschooler, and strives for a new social role as a schoolchild. The social maturity of the child is manifested in the formation of the internal position of the student (“I want to go to school!”). This means that the child has psychologically moved into a new age period of his development - primary school age. The following indicators testify to the presence of the internal position of the student:
the child has a positive attitude towards entering school or staying in it, does not think of himself outside of school or in isolation from it, understands the need for learning;
shows a special interest in the new, proper school content of the classes: he prefers writing and counting lessons to classes of the “preschool” type (drawing, singing, physical education), has a meaningful idea of ​​preparing for school;
the child refuses the organization of activities and behavior characteristic of preschool childhood: he prefers classroom classes to learning at home, has a positive attitude towards socially accepted norms of behavior, prefers the traditional way of assessing educational achievements (mark) to other types of encouragement characteristic of direct-personal relationships (sweets, gifts) ; recognizes the authority of the teacher.
“Many school teachers have a one-sided approach to the preschool period of development. All the successes of preschool education are considered exclusively through the prism of preparing children for school, and even in a very narrow range (the ability to read, write, count). In general, the approach to a particular period of development in childhood cannot be considered narrowly pragmatically, as preparation for the transition to the next stage of development. Everything is just the opposite. The very transition to the next, higher stage of development is prepared and determined by how fully the previous period has been lived, by how much those internal contradictions that can be resolved through such a transition have matured. If it is done before these contradictions have matured - artificially forced, not taking into account objective factors, then the formation of the child's personality will significantly suffer, and the damage may be irreparable. (Elkonin D. B., 1989a. - S. 98). Training and mental development
Another component of the psychological and pedagogical factor, as already noted, is the didactic and methodological system within which schooling is carried out. What role does this component play in determining the success or failure of training? Before answering this question, let us briefly consider the question of the relationship between learning and mental development.
One of the factors influencing the success of schooling and largely predetermining the difficulties of the student in learning is the level of mental development of children. Certain difficulties in teaching arise in the event of a discrepancy between the requirements imposed by the educational process on the level of implementation of the cognitive activity of the student, with the real level of his mental development.
Mental development is considered as one of the sides of the general mental development of a person. In schoolchildren, mental development plays a significant role, since the success of educational activities sometimes depends on it. And the success / failure of educational activities is reflected in all aspects of the personality - emotional, need-motivational, volitional,
characterological. Mainly mental development occurs under social influence - training and education. And here schooling is of paramount importance, in the process of which, through the assimilation of a system of scientific knowledge, the processes of thinking of the student develop, setting in motion their own internal processes of self-development.
What influences mental development? To a certain extent, it takes place as a result of the natural maturation of the brain, which is an indispensable prerequisite for mental development in general. But mainly mental development occurs under social influence - training and education.
What is mental development (intelligence)? Different authors have different definitions of this concept. So, F. Klix defines intelligence as the ability for such an organization cognitive activity, at which the given goal (problem) can be achieved in the most efficient way, that is, with the least amount of time and resources; Cold M.A. believes that the intellect is a system of mental mechanisms that determine the possibility of constructing a subjective picture of what is happening. From the point of view of Kolmykova Z.I. - this is a complex dynamic system of quantitative and qualitative changes occurring in the intellectual activity of the subject in connection with his mastery of human experience in accordance with the socio-historical conditions in which he lives, and the individual age characteristics of his psyche.
The modern view on the content and ways of mental development of schoolchildren is closely connected with theoretical ideas about cognitive structures with the help of which a person extracts information from the environment, analyzes and synthesizes all incoming new impressions and information. The more they are developed, the greater the possibility of obtaining, analyzing and synthesizing information, the more a person sees and understands in the world around him and in himself.
In connection with this view, the main task of school education should be the formation of structurally organized and well-organized, internally dissected cognitive structures, which are the psychological basis of acquired knowledge. Only such a base can provide flexibility and mobility of thinking, the ability to mentally compare different objects in a variety of ways and aspects, in other words, the acquired knowledge will not be formal, but effective, enabling a wide and versatile handling of them. Therefore, in the process of schooling, the child needs not only to be informed of the amount of knowledge, but also to form in him a system of knowledge that forms an internally ordered structure. This can be achieved in two ways:
- Purposefully and systematically develop the thinking of students;
- to offer for assimilation a system of knowledge, compiled taking into account the formation of cognitive structures, which leads to an increase in the quality of mental activity.
Mental development and quality of knowledge acquisition
Educational activity belongs to those specific human activities that make the highest demands on the level of development of the analytical-synthetic processes of schoolchildren. The assimilation of knowledge is one of the main tasks and one of the main results of educational activity. However, high-quality assimilation of knowledge is impossible without the full-fledged work of students' thinking, which means a sufficiently high level of development of such leading thought processes as analysis and synthesis, which themselves develop in the process of assimilation of knowledge. The high level of development of these mental operations, which characterizes the complication of mental activity as a whole, its improvement, determines not so much the accumulation and expansion of the total amount of knowledge, but the versatility of knowledge about the same content.
In the implementation of cognitive activity, the processes of analysis and synthesis function in close relationship, these are two sides of a single act of cognition. Thus, the processes of analysis, that is, the mental division of the perceived content into parts, signs, properties, are carried out in order to then, in accordance with the cognitive task that faces the subject, make the reverse transition from the parts identified by the analysis to their mental unification, restoration in a new , analyzed form, that is, to integrate these parts at a new, higher level, which indicates the development of the process of cognition as a whole.
The tightness of the relationship between analysis and synthesis is manifested in the fact that the effectiveness of synthesis processes largely depends on how well the processes of analysis carried out the division of the perceived whole in accordance with the cognitive task set. If the analysis of the material turned out to be superficial, shallow, if various properties or features are singled out partially or even fragmentarily, without any systemic connection with other properties or features, then the synthesis processes in most cases will not be able to ensure the subsequent full integration of the digestible material. S. L. Rubinshtein noted that "... the further the analysis is advanced, the wider the synthesis that implements the generalization contained in the concept" (2003, p. 143).
Many psychologists have pointed out the important role of the processes of analysis and synthesis in educational activity. So, S. L. Rubinshtein noted that the process of thinking is behind the assimilation of knowledge and that assimilation is the analysis, synthesis and generalization of knowledge. Therefore, psychological differences in the assimilation of knowledge essentially represent differences in the level and nature of the development of the processes of analysis and synthesis. The formation of the operation of analysis and synthesis occurs as new content appears at different stages of the child's development. The school educational material to be mastered is especially diverse in its content. Therefore, the requirements that educational activities
presents to the analytical-synthetic processes of schoolchildren. It is the need to carry out different types of analysis, due to the different content of the educational material, that can explain a number of difficulties in mastering knowledge that students experience when they are not formed.
Mental development and school performance.
Common sense dictates that such a relationship must exist. Indeed, it is quite understandable and understandable that students with a higher level of mental development show better results in schooling. And indeed, in the most general form, such a connection is found. On fig. taken from the work of M.A. Kholodnaya (2002), a general pattern (dashed line) is shown, consisting in the fact that the higher the indicators of the intellectual development of students, the higher their academic performance. It is important to note, however, that such a connection is most clearly and unambiguously manifested only at the initial stage of schooling.

Having a significant impact on school performance, mental development does not always unequivocally determine the school success or failure of the child. In middle and high school, other factors begin to have a strong influence on the success of schooling, blurring the influence of the factor of mental development. In other words, a direct relationship between the level of mental development of a schoolchild and the average score of his school performance is not always confirmed in school practice. This means that a child who is characterized by a low level of mental development can study well enough, and a student who shows high results on intellectual tests can demonstrate average or below average success in learning. This testifies to the variety of reasons that give rise to school failure, where the level of mental development is only one of them.
Didactic-methodical system of school education.
Another component of the psychological and pedagogical factor, as already noted, is the didactic and methodological system within which schooling is carried out. What role does this component play in determining the success and failure of training? Before answering this question, let us briefly consider the question of the relationship between learning and mental development. Vygotsky L.S. noted that the learning process should be considered not only as the formation of skills, but also as an intellectual activity aimed at identifying and transferring the structural principles found in solving one problem to a number of others. Learning some particular operation, the child thereby acquires the ability to form structures of a certain type, regardless of the material with which he operates, and of the individual elements that make up this structure. Consequently, by taking a step in learning, the child advances in development by two steps, i.e. learning and development are not the same.
It is undeniable that education must be in keeping with the developmental level of the child. To find out the real relationship of the development process to learning opportunities, it is necessary to determine at least two levels of a child's development: the first is the level of actual development and the second is the zone of proximal development. Despite the recognition of the important role of education in the processes of mental development, school curricula for many years focused on yesterday in the development of the child, that is, on the level of his current development. Dissatisfaction with this situation has led many scientists, methodologists to develop developing curricula for elementary school. The difference between developing programs is that they create a zone of proximal development of schoolchildren by means of special structuring of the content on the basis of the basic laws of mental development. This means that in the course of assimilation of knowledge a number of internal processes of development are set in motion, which would be impossible without such training.
D. B. Elkonin wrote that the problem of learning and mental development becomes relevant every time when new tasks are faced by the school. In domestic child psychology, this problem first arose in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when it became necessary to make education accessible to the masses of peasant children. For this, a comprehensive system of education was created, thanks to which the assimilation of knowledge approached the empirical experience of children. This gave a big leap in raising the literacy rate of children. However, truly in the world scientific concepts such a system was not introduced, so there was a transition to subject education. He had opponents who believed that education should be adapted to the current level of development of children. L. S. Vygotsky spoke out against them, believing that education, of course, should take into account the student's available abilities, but its main goal should be to expand these opportunities, to develop them. The assimilation of scientific concepts by children with the help of a teacher leads to the development of their consciousness and thinking. L. S. Vygotsky reflected the internal connection between learning and development in the concept of “zone of proximal development”. Only such training can be considered good, which creates a zone of proximal development and thus goes ahead of it.
The problem of training and development became acute for the second time in the 1960s. It was then that a global problem began to be discussed: what should education be like in the era of the scientific and technological revolution? Attempts were made to modify the programs for the senior classes, which inevitably entailed a radical change in primary education. And again, the problem of training and development came to the fore. It was during these years that didactic systems for younger schoolchildren L. V. Zankova, V. V. Davydova - D. B. Elkonina, problem-based learning (M. I. Makhmutov and others), various programs built on the theory of P. Ya. Galperin on the phased formation of mental actions to study the influence of learning on the development of thinking of preschoolers (L. F. Obukhova and others). This problem (in a latent form) also manifested itself in the process of school reform in the 1980s in connection with the perestroika processes that were then taking place in our society. The appearance along with the three-year four-year initial stage and the beginning of education for children from the age of 6 (that is, the shift in the beginning of school education to an earlier period) required a meaningful consideration of the relationship between education and development, primarily from the point of view of the zone of proximal development of 6-year-old children and the success of their assimilation school knowledge.
As L. S. Vygotsky noted, the question of the relationship between the education and development of a child at school age is a central and basic issue, without which the problems of pedagogical psychology cannot be not only correctly resolved, but even posed.
Conclusion
Solving the problem of the relationship between learning and development should give its answer to an important question of teaching practice: should pedagogy build the learning process based on the level of development that the child has reached to date, on its passed and completed stages, or focus on structures that are still only are in the state of their formation? The answer to this question determines the fundamental position in the approach to building a learning system. Despite the recognition of the important role of education in the processes of mental development, school curricula for many years focused on yesterday in the development of the child, that is, on the level of his current development. This is the so-called traditional schooling, which, although it provides some progress in the development of students, still does not provide an opportunity to reveal the internal driving forces of development, not only in childhood, but also in adulthood. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs led L. V. Zankov, and then V. V. Davydov and D. B. Elkonin, to the development of developing curricula for elementary schools. The difference between developing programs and the traditional program is that they create a zone of proximal development of schoolchildren by means of special structuring of the content on the basis of the basic laws of mental development. This means that in the course of assimilation of knowledge a number of internal processes of development are set in motion, which would be impossible without such training. As a result, the mental development of students rises to a higher level compared to the traditional system of education. If we consider this issue in the context of school failure, it becomes clear that training according to developmental curricula in the context of a constant orientation towards "tomorrow" in the mental development of the child, the creation today of those psychological prerequisites that will be necessary for him in the future to master the educational material, provide a higher degree of success in schooling. However, the choice of a didactic system for their child by parents is not always possible due to various reasons: the lack of teachers working on developmental programs in this school and the preference for a traditional curriculum, overcrowding of classes in which education is conducted according to developmental programs. And although, due to the polycausality of school failure, it cannot be argued that education in developmental programs in itself guarantees full school performance, and education in a traditional program, on the contrary, inevitably leads to academic failure, there are still good reasons to believe that teaching a child in The developing environment creates the best conditions for the successful assimilation of knowledge. The results of the study of literature and Internet sources in this area showed the significance of the influence of psychological, personal factors on the student's progress against the background of a much weaker influence of other factors. Therefore, a significant help in organizing a normal educational process will be to ensure continuity between the school and preschool periods of a child's education; taking into account the peculiarities of the psyche, educational difficulties and mistakes of children in their causal relationship; the orientation of class work to eliminate educational errors, group work to overcome educational difficulties, individual work to neutralize negative actions caused by the mental characteristics of individual children.
Achievement is a multifaceted phenomenon of school reality, requiring versatile approaches in its study.
The following factors of student achievement can be distinguished:
1. Motivational readiness. The content of this component is that the child has a need to acquire knowledge as the dominant educational motive.
2. Intellectual readiness. This component is primarily associated with the degree of development of the child's mental activity.
3. Volitional readiness: you need to be able to subordinate your behavior to the rules, be able to manage your processes of attention, voluntary memorization, purposefully manage thought processes.
4. The nature of the child's social development: the child's ability to hear, understand the teacher, complete tasks, communicate in a certain, accepted style.
Learnability, or the pace of advancement, is influenced by many features of the psyche of students - attention, memory, volitional qualities, etc. But since learning to a certain extent is a characteristic of mental abilities, its content, first of all, includes features of thinking that determine the degree of its productivity . What features of thought processes influence the process of acquiring knowledge? This is a qualitative originality of the development of the processes of analysis, synthesis, generalization, abstraction.
It is they that determine such individual-typical features of the thinking of schoolchildren as:
1) the depth or superficiality of thinking (the degree of materiality of the features abstracted when mastering new material and the level of their generalization);
2) flexibility or inertia of thinking (degree of ease of transition from direct to reverse connections, from one system of actions to another, rejection of habitual, template actions). For example, account
in the mind. Some students tend to avoid this form of work and replace the mental representation of the decision record with a column. This is the desire to create the possibility of reproducing the same system of purely external technical methods of calculation, that is, action according to a template;
3) stability or instability of thinking (the possibility of a more or less long-term focus on significant signs - one or a combination. The transition from one action to another under the influence of random associations is an indicator of the instability of thinking); 4) awareness (a verbal report on the progress of the decision that is adequate to practical actions problems, providing an opportunity to learn from their mistakes).
For a child to study well, it is necessary:
1) the absence of significant mental deficiencies;
2) a sufficient cultural level of the family, or at least the desire to achieve such a level;
3) material opportunities to meet the most important spiritual needs of a person;
4) the skill of teachers working with the child at school.
Literature
1. Lokalova N.P. “School failure. Causes, psychocorrection, psychoprophylaxis” 2. Vakhrushev S.V. Psychodiagnostics of difficulties in teaching primary school teachers. - M., 1995. 3. Vygotsky L.S. Problems of study and mental development. – Fav. Research - M., 1974. 4. Stepanova O.A. Prevention of school difficulties in children: Methodological guide. - M.: TC Sphere, 2003. - 128 p. 5. Internet sources http://www.psyh.ru/rubric/3/articles/8/

The relationship between academic performance and mental abilities is much more complex in schoolchildren with persistent low academic performance. This included schoolchildren with deuces and triples in almost all subjects, and the triples are often inadequate to their real knowledge of the program material (these are “gentle” grades that allow transferring to the next class even those who have not actually mastered the initial minimum of knowledge), i.e. . children with open and potential, latent academic failure. 71% of them are children with low rates of general mental abilities; and of these, 41% of those who have low indicators of the development of verbal-logical thinking are close to the average indicators of intuitive-practical thinking; 26% of those who have both types of thinking - the average level of development; 4% of students with relatively high ability scores. This scatter of data reflects the variety of reasons that give rise to a lag in the assimilation of knowledge. An additional study of children with poor progress showed that the root causes of poor progress may also lie in the characteristics of the personal parameters of mental activity, which had an inhibitory effect on the assimilation of knowledge, which led to a deficit in the fund of effective knowledge. Under the influence of unfavorable socio-pedagogical conditions, such children formed a negative attitude towards school, teachers, inadequate self-esteem developed, extracurricular interests that were not related to cognitive activity dominated, etc.

However, a large percentage of children with high mental abilities among well-performing schoolchildren and the absence of children with low learning abilities among them, as well as a significant predominance of children with reduced abilities among schoolchildren lagging behind in learning, indicates a decisive influence on the level of knowledge assimilation of the degree of formation of those qualities of mental activity. , which determine its productivity, i.e. the second component of mental development - general mental abilities to assimilate knowledge.

One of the factors influencing the success of schooling and largely predetermining the difficulties of the student in learning is the level of mental development of children. Certain difficulties in teaching arise in the event of a discrepancy between the requirements imposed by the educational process on the level of implementation of the cognitive activity of the student, with the real level of his mental development.

Mental development is considered as one of the sides of the general mental development of a person. In schoolchildren, mental development plays a significant role, since the success of educational activities sometimes depends on it. And the success of educational activity is reflected in all aspects of the personality - emotional, motivational, strong-willed, characterological. What influences mental development? To a certain extent, it takes place as a result of the natural maturation of the brain, which is an indispensable prerequisite for mental development in general. But mainly mental development occurs under social influence - training and education.