Prerequisites for self-organization of certain psychological characteristics in secondary school classes

Abstract

The class as a developmental system is an open system in which, thanks to interpersonal interactions, each student exchanges energy and information with other participants of the educational process, creating conditions for instability. The works of N. V. Grishina and S. N. Kostromina (Grishina, Kostromina 2021) examine the theoretical aspects of the emergence of nonequilibrium states for personality psychology without reference to specific conditions of the educational environment. The purpose of this study was to identify the conditions in which certain psychological characteristics of students self-organize during the educational process. The empirical part of the study focused on a set of intellectual, value-motivational and personal characteristics of students of grades 4 to 11 over the period of 10 years. It is a part of the psychological monitoring conducted by the employees of the Regional Socio-Psychological Center under the leadership of T. N. Klyueva in educational organizations of Samara Region. It is shown that the following psychological characteristics self-organized in some class: cognitive activity, anxiety, anger, the achievement motive and the learning motive (C. D. Spielberg’s State-Trait Personality Inventory, adapted by A. D. Andreeva); conscious self-regulation (SSP-M meththe phenomenon of self-organization arose in the class in the presence of two attractors — i.e., stable states to which the psychological characteristics under study are drawn. The emergence of self-organization in a particular classroom was proven through the solution of difference equations with nonlinear approximation. The research hypothesis was that there is a relationship between the phenomenon of self-organization in the classroom and the level of subject-subject types of interaction between students. From environmental psychology it is known that subjectsubject types of interaction include the subject-generating, subject-joint and subject-separate types of interaction, which are present in both communication and joint activities. In a pilot study (8th and 9th grades; 6th and 7th grades) on a sample of schoolchildren (n = 132, 50% females), it was established using the example of joint educational activities that the phenomenon of self-organization is observed when the number of subject-subject types of interaction in the class is at least 30% of the total number of interactions.