Article
Only Internalization?
The article reveals the findings of the experimental work that has been done in order to compare three Russian educational systems (traditional system, Zankov’s system and the system of Elkonin- Davidov) in their potentials to develop the junior schoolchild intellectual abilities and personality traits. The complex of indices (intellectual abilities and personality traits) has been identified to examine the educational systems. They are the indices of attention, memory, thinking, imagination and personality traits (achievement motive, learning motives and empathy). As a result of conducted experiment of the students’ development in different educational systems it has been identified that each of examined systems are ‘developmental’ however each develops different mental functions and operations.
The dynamics of views on human development is considered from the points of primitive human being development, infant and schoolchild development. The originality of views on development is reviewed as process of signification. It is emphasized that infant development concerns the internal mechanisms of mental activity formation and the acquisition of these mechanisms. The ability developmental process is addressed to intellectual operations acquisition that the schoolchildren acquire through the learning activity. The experimental data confirming the effectiveness of considered approach to mental development are given.
The results of series of experiments in investigating the role of reflection in developing of students’ intellectual abilities are discussed in the article. The dynamics of intelligence and reflection relationship indexes change in various stages of schooling (the fourth, sixth and tenth grades) is examined. The results of the two years experimental work to develop stu-dents’ intellectual abilities in educational process are discussed. Key words: intelligence, intellectual operations, intellectual abilities, reflection, ability development, learning ac-tivity.
The distractive effects on attentional task performance in different paradigms are analyzed in this paper. I demonstrate how distractors may negatively affect (interference effect), positively (redundancy effect) or neutrally (null effect). Distractor effects described in literature are classified in accordance with their hypothetical source. The general rule of the theory is also introduced. It contains the formal prediction of the particular distractor effect, based on entropy and redundancy measures from the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon, 1948). Single- vs dual-process frameworks are considered for hypothetical mechanisms which underpin the distractor effects. Distractor profiles (DPs) are also introduced for the formalization and simple visualization of experimental data concerning the distractor effects. Typical shapes of DPs and their interpretations are discussed with examples from three frequently cited experiments. Finally, the paper introduces hierarchical hypothesis that states the level-fashion modulating interrelations between distractor effects of different classes.