CORRECTION AND DEVELOPMENTAL WORK WITH CHILDREN OF SENIOR PRESCHOOL AGE

Preschool childhood is one of the most important stages of a child’s life: without a fully lived, comprehensively filled childhood, his entire subsequent life will be flawed. Extremely high pace of mental, personal and physical development during this period, it allows the child to quickly go from a helpless being to a person who masters all the basic principles of human culture. He does not walk this path alone; adults are constantly next to him - parents, educators, psychologists. Competent interaction between adults in the process of raising a child ensures the maximum realization of all the opportunities available to him and will allow him to avoid many difficulties and deviations in the course of his mental and personal development. Plastic, quickly ripening nervous system A preschooler requires a careful attitude towards himself. When creating new intensive programs of developmental work with a child, it is necessary to keep in mind not only what he can achieve, but also what physical and neuropsychic costs it will cost him. Any attempts to shorten the preschool period of life as “preliminary” or “unreal” disrupt the course of individual development child, do not allow him to use all the opportunities that this age provides for the flourishing of his psyche and personality.

THE PROBLEM OF PSYCHOLOGICAL READINESS FOR STUDYING AT SCHOOL

Seryozha will turn 7 years old in October, and his mother wants to send him to school. Seryozha himself wants this, especially since the kindergarten group he attends is preparatory, i.e. "graduation"

However, the school psychologist, after talking with the boy, advised his mother to delay enrolling in school, explaining that he was “still small.” Mom was offended and took Seryozha to a nearby school. But even there, the psychologist made the same strange, from the point of view of Serezha’s mother, conclusion: it is too early for the boy to study, let him go to kindergarten for one more year.

Mom is perplexed: “How small is he? Just a couple of months younger than many of his friends. And I went to preschool gymnasium all year, learned to read and count a little. What else do you need?

Senior preschool age immediately precedes the child’s transition to the next, very important stage of his life – entering school. Therefore, preparation for school begins to occupy a significant place in working with children of the 6th and 7th year of life. Here two aspects can be distinguished: firstly, the ongoing targeted development of the child’s personality and cognitive mental processes that underlie his successful mastery of the curriculum itself in the future, and secondly, teaching primary school skills (elements of writing, reading, counting ).

The problem of a child’s readiness for schooling today is considered primarily as a psychological one: priority is given to the level of development of the motivational-need sphere, voluntariness mental processes, operational skills, development of fine motor skills of the hand. It has been established that intellectual readiness for school alone does not ensure a child’s successful entry into educational activities. However, in practice, work with older preschoolers comes down to teaching reading, writing and arithmetic in order to provide them with a head start in the first stage of schooling. This is partly caused by the curriculum itself. modern school: it is designed in such a way that little time is allocated for practicing the initial skills of writing, reading and counting. If a child comes to school illiterate, he lags behind his more advanced classmates simply because the curriculum is designed that way primary school. The formation in a child of appropriate educational motivation, arbitrariness of attention, memory, verbal-logical thinking, orientation to the method of action, and operational skills appears only as a by-product of learning: all this should form by itself, as intellectual skills develop. However, this is far from the case. Special studies show that children who are well intellectually prepared for school often write poorly and do not follow the rules for keeping notebooks or working with didactic material and experience a number of other educational difficulties.

Unfortunately, both teachers and parents have the belief that when a child reaches a certain age or enters school, it should automatically lead to the emergence and development of the above qualities. Having discovered that they are absent and this prevents a first-grader from studying well, adults begin to demand from him “to be conscientious and attentive,” forgetting that these qualities are formed throughout preschool childhood and their absence in a child of 6-7 years old indicates insufficient development working with him.

Research has shown that by the end of senior preschool age, not all children reach the level of psychological maturity that would allow them to successfully transition to systematic education. We can identify a number of indicators of the psychological immaturity of a child entering school.

1. Weak speech development children. Two aspects are highlighted here: a) differences in the level of speech development of different children; b) formal, unconscious knowledge by children of the meaning of various words and concepts. The child uses them, but when asked directly what a given word means, he often gives an incorrect or approximate answer. This use of vocabulary is especially often observed when memorizing poems and retelling texts. This is due to excessive emphasis on the accelerated verbal (speech) development of the child, which for adults is an indicator of his intellectual development.

2. Underdevelopment of fine motor skills. To a certain extent, the underdevelopment of the hand is manifested when cutting out figures along the contour, in the disproportion of parts of the figure during sculpting, inaccurate gluing, etc.

3. Incorrect formation of methods of educational work. Many children have difficulty learning rules. Although children are able to apply a rule when completing a task, they have difficulty remembering its wording. Moreover, many guys first do the exercise, and then learn the rule that this exercise was aimed at fulfilling. Psychological analysis shows that the reason for this lies not so much in the unsatisfactory formulation of the rules, but in the lack of development of the necessary skills in working with the rules in children.

4. Children’s lack of orientation to the method of action, poor command of operational skills. Children who are good at counting by the time they enter school experience difficulties in solving problems when it is necessary to show the progress of the solution in a detailed form, step by step: the conditions for the solution and the method of solution begin to get confused, the child has difficulty finding an error in the solution.

This also determines the problem of understanding, accepting and retaining a learning task throughout the entire period of its implementation, especially if it requires a series of sequential actions. Often, especially in first grade, children understand the task assigned to them, accept it, but still do not perform it as the adult explained. With step-by-step supervision from an adult, children complete the task quite successfully.

5. Poor development voluntary attention, memory. Children are disorganized, easily distracted, and have difficulty following the progress of group work and the answers of other children, especially when reading or retelling in a chain, after each other.

6. Low level of development of self-control. Children experience difficulties in cases where an adult asks them to compare their performance with the assigned task and find their own mistakes. At the same time, children quite easily find mistakes in someone else’s work, i.e. The skills necessary for the checking action have been developed, but the child is not yet able to apply these skills to monitoring his own work.

The indicated manifestations of psychological immaturity in older children up to school age are a consequence of adults’ weak attention to the development of cognitive mental processes and personal qualities child during preschool childhood. It is not easy to identify such characteristics of children.

A practical kindergarten psychologist can use a program for diagnosing the psychological maturity of children of senior preschool age, compiled taking into account the indicators highlighted above. The entire complex of techniques is aimed at high-quality diagnostics of the development of those mental functions that occupy a central place in big picture the psychological maturity of the child and his readiness for systematic learning. The completion of each task demonstrates that the child has developed not only the mental cognitive process at which it is primarily aimed at diagnosing, but also a number of other functions associated with it, the level of development of which largely determines the quality of the solution to the experimental task. Thus, all the results shown by the child complement each other, which makes it possible to obtain a more complete understanding of the degree of psychological maturity of a child of senior preschool age and, on this basis, to conduct correctional and developmental work with him.

For the discipline: Developmental psychology

Topic: The problem of children's readiness for school

Introduction

1. Brief description of children of senior preschool age and the crisis of seven years

2. Motivational readiness for school

3. Strong-willed readiness for school

4. Social readiness for school

5. Intellectual readiness for school

6. Physiological readiness for school

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

School is a social institution that was formed historically relatively recently, and a child’s enrollment in school plays a leading role in the process of adaptation to life in society.

Entering school is a very serious step for a child, as it is a turning point in life. He seems to be trying to get out of his childhood and take a new place in the system of relations mediated by norms of behavior; a desire appears to “become a real schoolchild” and carry out real, serious, socially significant activities.

When a child moves to a new stage of development, a change in leading activity occurs, this is a transition from role-playing game to educational activities.

How a child’s school life turns out, how successful the start of schooling will be, determines the student’s performance in subsequent years, his attitude towards school, and ultimately his well-being in life. adult life. If a student does not study well, this always negatively affects relationships with peers or the family microclimate.

The problem of children's readiness for school education is, first of all, considered from the point of view of compliance of the child's development level with the requirements of educational activities.

Many parents believe that school readiness lies only in mental readiness, so they devote maximum time to developing the child’s memory, attention and thinking. Not all activities involve the formation necessary qualities for schooling.

Often, children who are unsuccessful in their studies have all the necessary skills in writing, counting, reading and have a fairly high level of development. But readiness presupposes not only the presence of certain skills and abilities necessary for studying at school, it is necessary to ensure the full and harmonious development of the child.

Preparing children for school is a complex task, covering all areas of a child’s life.

These are, first of all, the levels of social-personal, motivational, volitional, intellectual development, all of which are necessary for the successful mastery of the school curriculum. When children enter school, insufficient development of any component of psychological readiness is often revealed. Shortcomings in the formation of one of the levels sooner or later entail a lag or distortion in the development of others and one way or another affect the success of training.

And so, the goal of the work is to analyze the child’s psychological readiness for school.

Based on the goal, the following task is planned: analyze the main components psychological readiness child to schooling, and specifically: motivational, social-personal, intellectual, volitional, physiological.

1. Brief characteristics of children of senior preschool age and the crisis of seven years

The seven-year crisis is a critical period that requires a change in the social situation; it is associated with the beginning of the child’s education at school.

It is at this age that the foundations of personality are laid and a stable hierarchy of motives is formed (the bittersweet phenomenon). There is a desire to take a new position in society and perform socially useful activities. If there is no change in the social situation, then the child develops a feeling of dissatisfaction.

The crisis of seven years is characterized by defiant behavior of the child, he behaves, makes faces, and clowns around. According to Vygodsky, such behavior indicates a loss of childish spontaneity; the child seems to experience a separation of internal and external life, the child tries on different roles, and through this, a loss of spontaneity of behavior occurs. Until the age of seven, a child acts in accordance with the problem that is relevant to him. The acquisition of mediocrity of behavior includes awareness; between the idea of ​​an action and the action itself, censorship, a norm of behavior, is inserted; behavior becomes more independent of various environmental influences.

The child begins to realize and evaluate his place among other people, an internal social position is formed, the desire to meet the demands of an adult, to accept a new social role - the role of a schoolchild.

New social needs appear, the need for respect, recognition by peers and adults. The desire to act in accordance with the rules, the child needs to perform the action correctly. He strives to participate in group activities. Moral norms, social values, and rules of behavior in society are being learned; now you have to act not as you want, but as you should.

The child’s activity acquires new content. The ability not only to control your actions, but also to focus on results.

Psychological research indicates that during preschool childhood, a child already develops self-esteem; this emerging self-esteem is based on the results of activities, success or failure, as well as the assessments of others and the approval of parents.

That. the presence of a seven-year crisis is an indicator of psychological readiness for school.

2. Motivational readiness for school

Motivational readiness is considered as the motivation to study, the child’s desire to study at school. The child’s initial motive is to ascend to a new level of relationship.

There are external and internal motivation. Most children of senior preschool age dream of becoming schoolchildren, but of course, almost none of them have any idea what school is in reality; many children have a completely idealized attribute idea of ​​school; if you ask them who a schoolchild is, they will certainly answer that this is a child who carries a large briefcase, sits at his desk with his hand raised, writes, reads, and good children get A's, and bad children get D's. And I want the same, and everyone will praise me.

Internal motivation is associated with a direct desire to learn, expressed in cognitive interest, manifested in the desire to learn new things, to find out the incomprehensible. A very difficult situation arises, because not all children are ready to fulfill the teacher’s demands and do not get along in the new social environment due to the lack of an internal motive. A child’s cognitive need exists from birth, and the more adults satisfy the child’s cognitive interest, the stronger it becomes, so parents need to devote as much time as possible to the development of children, for example, reading books to them, playing games. educational games and so on.

Academic motivation develops in a first-grader when there is a pronounced cognitive need and the ability to work. A first-grader tries to be an exemplary student in order to earn the praise of the teacher and then the parent. Emotional praise allows the child to believe in his abilities, increases his self-esteem and stimulates the desire to cope with what is not immediately possible. (Bozhovich)

3. Strong-willed readiness for school

One more component school readiness- volitional readiness. Volitional readiness implies the child’s readiness to have to fulfill the teacher’s demands. This is the ability to act according to the rules, in accordance with the established pattern. Fulfillment of the rule underlies the social relations of a child and an adult.

D.B. Elkonin conducted an experiment. First grade children were asked to draw four circles, and then color three yellow and one blue; the children painted all the circles in different colors, claiming that it was more beautiful this way. This experiment perfectly demonstrates that not all children are ready to accept rules.

The emergence of will leads to the fact that the child begins to consciously control himself, manage his internal and external actions, his cognitive processes and behavior in general. He gradually masters the ability to subordinate his actions to motives.

L. S. Vygotsky and S. L. Rubinstein believe that the appearance of a volitional act is prepared by the previous development of the voluntary behavior of a preschooler.

4. Social readiness for school

Social readiness is a readiness to new form relationships in a school situation.

Going to school is, first of all, a student gaining a new social status. He enters into new social relationships, the child-teacher model, which subsequently affects the child’s relationships with parents and the child with peers, because the way the situation at school develops will determine how much success will be expressed, which will subsequently affect relationships with peers and parents.

In a lesson situation, there are strict rules that the student must adhere to, for example, only subject communication.

Children who are ready to learn, understand the conventions of educational communication and behave adequately in the classroom; communication between teacher and student acquires a feature of arbitrariness.

5. Intellectual readiness

The child must be able to communicate in dialogue, be able to ask questions, answer questions, and have the skill of retelling.

In order for a student’s education to be successful, it is necessary that his level of actual development must be such that the training program falls into the child’s “zone of proximal development,” otherwise he simply will not be able to assimilate the material.

It goes without saying that you have basic writing, reading and counting skills. The child must be able to compare, generalize, classify objects, and identify essential features and draw conclusions. Now he has to work with abstract categories and scientific concepts. “The child must learn to distinguish between different aspects of reality, only then can he move on to subject teaching. The child must see in an object its parameters, the individual aspects that make up its content. And also to master scientific concepts, the child must understand that his point of view is not absolute and not the only one.”

A child of senior preschool age has already formed operations, this is proven by an experiment with two flasks on the conservation of quantity.

6. Physiological readiness for school

It is also necessary to determine the physiological readiness for school, whether the child is ready for such loads; on the one hand, the student’s body is often ready for the requirements imposed by the school, but on the other hand , Some children find it very difficult to bear such mental stress and physical exercise, or the child may have poorly developed hand motor skills and cannot write, this is a failure of the regime and the restructuring of the whole body to a new way of life, maintaining attention in lessons for 40-45 minutes, etc. This is quite difficult for some. Before entering school, honey is taken. examination and readiness is determined. According to indications, by the age of 8 almost everyone is ready. Physiological readiness is determined by three criteria: physiological, biological and health status. At school, a child faces a lot of problems, for example, an incorrect position can lead to curvature of the spine, or deformation of the hand due to heavy loads on the hand. Therefore, this is as significant a sign of development as the others.

Conclusion

Going to school is the most important step in a child’s development, requiring a very serious approach and preparation. We have established that a child’s readiness for school is a holistic phenomenon, and for complete readiness it is necessary that each of the signs be fully developed; if at least one parameter is poorly developed, this can have serious consequences. Comprehensive preparation for school includes five main components: motivational, intellectual, social, volitional, physiological readiness. It is advisable to determine psychological readiness for school a year before the expected admission, since in this case there is time to change what needs correction. There are many methods for diagnosing children's readiness for school; they require careful selection, since many of them are inadequate. When preparing a child for school, it is also necessary to consult with a child psychologist and teachers.

Crisis 7 years. Personal development and the emergence of self-awareness become the causes of the seven-year crisis. Main signs: 1) loss of spontaneity; 2) mannerisms (secrets appear) 3) symptom of “bitter candy” (when the child feels bad, he tries to hide it). The appearance of these signs leads to difficulties in communicating with adults, the child withdraws and becomes uncontrollable. These problems are based on experiences, and their appearance is associated with the emergence of the child’s inner life. This is very important point, because the orientation of behavior will be refracted through the child’s personal experiences. The 7-year crisis entails a transition to a new social situation, which requires a new content of relationships. Previous social relationships (d/s, etc.) have already exhausted themselves, so he strives to go to school as soon as possible and enter into new social relationships. The symptom of loss of spontaneity distinguishes preschool childhood and junior school. age.

2. Neoplasms of preschool age..

1. System of motives. We have seen that in the process of play, a child, playing out the patterns of adult behavior known to him, develops an increasingly complete and adequate attitude towards the people around him and himself. Needs determine the content of motives, and the latter are gradually transformed into a more or less hierarchized system. It is this system of motives that forms the basis of the arbitrariness of mental processes (memory, attention, thinking) and, ultimately, voluntary behavior.

Z Imagination and figurative thinking, voluntary memory. We saw how, in the process of play, new cognitive processes for the child were formed and developed - imagination and imaginative thinking, which also formed the basis for the arbitrariness of mental processes.

Thus, by the end of preschool childhood, such psychological formations as imagination, imaginative thinking, voluntary memory and attention are formed.

3. The emergence of primary ethical authorities - the concepts of good and evil.

4. The emergence of the beginnings of voluntary behavior. Availability of arbitrary cognitive activity and systems of subordinate motives are the basis for the voluntary behavior of a preschooler.

5. The emergence of self-awareness of the personality of a preschooler. The child develops self-esteem, he realizes the possibilities of his actions and their limitations. Thus, he comes to understand his place in the system of relations in which he is located.

Thus, by the end of preschool age, three main psychological acquisitions can be distinguished:

The onset of voluntary behavior due to:

Arbitrariness of cognitive processes and

Decentration (separateness) of personality. All this taken together will allow him to soon fulfill a new role for himself - the role of a schoolboy. And it is the formation and level of development of these psychological new formations that determines the child’s level of readiness for school and his first steps to adapt to it.

3 The problem of school readiness

Requirements for children entering school and the problem of school readiness. The transition to schooling radically changes the child's entire lifestyle. During this period, his life includes learning, mandatory, responsible activity that requires systematic, organized work; In addition, this activity confronts the child with the task of consistent, deliberate assimilation of knowledge, generalized and systematized in the fundamentals of science, which presupposes a completely different structure of his cognitive activity than in preschool childhood. Entering school also marks a new position of the child in society, in the state, which is expressed in a change in his specific relationships with the people around him. The main thing in this change is a completely new system of requirements placed on the child and associated with his new responsibilities, which are important not only for himself and his family, but also for society. They begin to view him as a person who has entered the first step of the ladder leading to civic maturity.

According to the changed position of the child and the emergence of a new leading activity for him - learning - the entire daily course of his life is restructured: the carefree pastime of the preschooler is replaced by a life full of worries and responsibility - he must go to school, study those subjects that are determined school curriculum, do in class what the teacher requires; he must strictly follow the school regime, obey the school rules of behavior, and achieve a good assimilation of the knowledge and skills required by the program.

4. Features of the personality development of children in older preschool age

Senior preschool age plays a special role in the mental development of a child: during this period of life, new psychological mechanisms of activity and behavior begin to form.

At this age, the foundations of the future personality are laid: a stable structure of motives is formed; new social needs arise (the need for respect and recognition of an adult, the desire to perform important “adult” things for others, to be an “adult”; the need for peer recognition: older preschoolers actively show interest in collective forms of activity and at the same time - the desire in games and other activities to be the first, the best; there is a need to act in accordance with established rules and ethical standards, etc.); a new (indirect) type of motivation arises - the basis of voluntary behavior; the child learns a certain system of social values; moral norms and rules of behavior in society, in some situations he can already restrain his immediate desires and act differently from what he wants in this moment, and because it is “necessary” (I want to watch “cartoons”, but my mother asks me to play with my younger brother or go to the store; I don’t want to put away the toys, but this is the duty of the duty officer, which means it must be done, etc.).

Older preschoolers cease to be naive and spontaneous, as before, and become less understandable to others. The reason for such changes is the differentiation (separation) in the child’s consciousness of his internal and external life.

Until the age of seven, the child acts in accordance with the experiences that are relevant to him at the moment. His desires and the expression of these desires in behavior (i.e. internal and external) represent an inseparable whole. The behavior of a child at these ages can be roughly described by the scheme: “wanted - done.” Naivety and spontaneity indicate that the child is the same on the outside as he is on the inside; his behavior is understandable and easily “read” by others. The loss of spontaneity and naivety in the behavior of an older preschooler means the inclusion in his actions of a certain intellectual moment, which, as it were, wedges itself between the child’s experience and action. His behavior becomes conscious and can be described by another scheme: “wanted - realized - did.” Awareness is included in all areas of the life of an older preschooler: he begins to become aware of the attitude of those around him and his attitude towards them and towards himself, his individual experience, the results of his own activities, etc.

One of the most important achievements of senior preschool age is awareness of one’s social “I” and the formation of an internal social position. In the early periods of development, children are not yet aware of their place in life. Therefore, they lack a conscious desire to change. If the new needs that arise in children of these ages do not find fulfillment within the framework of the lifestyle they lead, this causes unconscious protest and resistance.

In senior preschool age The child for the first time becomes aware of the discrepancy between the position he occupies among other people and what his real capabilities and desires are. A clearly expressed desire appears to take a new, more “adult” position in life and to perform new activities that are important not only for himself, but also for other people. The child seems to “fall out” of his usual life and the pedagogical system applied to him, and loses interest in preschool activities. In the conditions of universal schooling, this is primarily manifested in the desire of children for the social status of a schoolchild and for learning as a new socially significant activity (“At school - big ones, but in kindergarten - only little ones”), as well as in the desire to carry out certain assignments adults, take on some of their responsibilities, become a helper in the family.

1. Requirements for children entering school and the problem of readiness for schooling. The transition to schooling radically changes the child's entire lifestyle. During this period, his life includes learning, mandatory, responsible activity that requires systematic, organized work; In addition, this activity confronts the child with the task of consistent, deliberate assimilation of knowledge, generalized and systematized in the fundamentals of science, which presupposes a completely different structure of his cognitive activity than in preschool childhood. Entering school also marks a new position of the child in society, in the state, which is expressed in a change in his specific relationships with the people around him. The main thing in this change is a completely new system of requirements placed on the child and associated with his new responsibilities, which are important not only for himself and his family, but also for society. They begin to view him as a person who has entered the first step of the ladder leading to civic maturity.

According to the changed situation of the child and the emergence of a new leading activity for him - learning - the entire daily course of his life is restructured: the carefree pastime of a preschooler is replaced by a life full of worries and responsibility - he must go to school, study those subjects that are determined by the school curriculum, do in the lesson what the teacher requires; he must strictly follow the school regime, obey the school rules of behavior, and achieve a good assimilation of the knowledge and skills required by the program.

The quality of a student’s academic work, as well as all of his behavior, is assessed by the school, and this assessment affects the attitude of those around him: teachers, parents, and friends. A child who is careless about his academic duties and does not want to learn is treated with condemnation by those around him - he is reproached, punished, which brings tension into his life, creates an atmosphere of trouble and causes him unpleasant and sometimes very difficult emotional experiences.

Thus, a child, having become a schoolchild, occupies a new place in society compared to a preschooler. He receives the responsibilities that society imposes on him and bears a serious responsibility to the school and parents for his educational activities.

Along with new responsibilities, the student also receives new rights. He can claim that adults will take his educational work seriously; he has the right to his workplace, for the time necessary for his studies, for silence; he has the right to rest and leisure. Having received a good grade for his work, he has the right to approval from others, he can demand from them respect for himself and his activities.

To summarize our brief description of the changes that occur in the life of a child entering school, we can say: the transition from preschool to school childhood is characterized by a decisive change in the child’s place in the system of available resources to him. public relations and his entire way of life. It should be emphasized that the position of the schoolchild due to universal compulsory education and the fact that ideological meaning, which is attached to work in our society, including educational work, creates a special moral orientation of the child’s personality. For him, learning is not just an activity of acquiring knowledge and not only a way to prepare oneself for the future - it is recognized and experienced by the child as his own work duty, as his participation in everyday life. working life surrounding people.

All these conditions lead to the fact that the school becomes the center of children's lives, filled with their own interests, relationships and experiences. Moreover, this inner mental life of a child who has become a schoolchild receives a completely different content and a different character than in preschool age: it is, first of all, connected with his teaching and academic affairs. Therefore, how a little schoolchild will cope with his school responsibilities, the presence of success or failure in his educational affairs, has an acute affective connotation for him. The loss of the corresponding position at school or the inability to rise to its height causes him to experience the loss of the main core of his life, that social ground, standing on which he feels like a member of a single social whole. Consequently, issues of schooling are not only issues of education and intellectual development of the child, but also issues of the formation of his personality, issues of upbringing.

We have briefly described the changes that occur in a child’s life - in his position, activities, in his relationships with people around him - as a result of entering school. We also pointed out the changes that occur in connection with this in the child’s internal position. However, in order for a child to develop an internal position as a schoolchild, a certain degree of readiness is necessary with which he comes to school. Moreover, when speaking about readiness, we mean not only the appropriate level of development of his cognitive activity, but also the level of development of his motivational sphere and thereby his attitude to reality.

2. The child’s readiness for school education in the field of cognitive activity. Psychology for a long time saw the main criterion of a child’s readiness for school education only in the level of his mental development, more precisely, in the stock of knowledge and ideas with which the child comes to school. It was the breadth of the “circle of ideas”, the “volume of mental inventory” of the child that was considered a guarantee of the possibility of his learning at school and the key to his success in acquiring knowledge. This view gave rise to late XIX and the beginning of the 20th century, numerous studies aimed at studying the “range of ideas” of children entering school and establishing the requirements that should be presented to the child in this regard.

However, psychological and pedagogical research, as well as the practice of schooling, have shown that there is no direct correspondence between the stock of ideas and the general level of mental development of the child, which ensures his intellectual readiness for schooling.

L. S. Vygotsky was one of the first in the Soviet Union to clearly formulate the idea that readiness for schooling in terms of a child’s intellectual development lies not so much in the quantitative stock of ideas, but in the level of development of intellectual processes, i.e., in the qualitative features of children’s thinking. From this point of view, to be ready for school education means to achieve a certain level of development of thought processes: the child must be able to identify what is essential in the phenomena of the surrounding reality, be able to compare them, see similar and different; he must learn to reason, find the causes of phenomena, and draw conclusions. A child who is not able to follow the teacher’s reasoning and follow him to the simplest conclusions is not yet ready for school. According to L. S. Vygotsky, to be ready for school education means, first of all, to have the ability to generalize and differentiate objects and phenomena of the surrounding world in appropriate categories. After all, mastering any academic subject presupposes that the child has the ability to isolate and make the object of his consciousness those phenomena of reality, the knowledge of which he must acquire. And this necessarily requires a certain level of generalization.

Children of preschool age often do not yet have this level of thinking development. For example, they do not know how to distinguish physical nature from what is made by man, social from natural. As an illustration of this thought, L. S. Vygotsky cites a statement from a 6-year-old girl, which he considers a characteristic expression of a preschool way of thinking: “Now I finally figured out,” she said, “how the rivers originated. It turns out that people chose a place near the bridge, dug a hole and filled it with water.”

The idea that for successful learning a child must be able to isolate the subject of his knowledge is especially convincing when mastering native language. L. S. Vygotsky drew attention to the fact that language as a certain objective system of word-signs and rules for their use does not exist for the consciousness of a preschooler. When mastering language practically, children of early and preschool age focus their attention primarily on the content that they want to designate or express using words, but not on language, which is a means of expressing the desired content; They don’t even notice this remedy. L. S. Vygotsky said that for a small child a word is like a transparent glass, behind which the object denoted by the word directly and directly shines through. In our own research, we were able to establish that a huge difficulty in teaching grammar, syntax and spelling at school lies precisely in this lack of awareness of the subject being learned. For example, in our study of student learning primary classes school rules for spelling unstressed vowels of the root, it was found that children of this age do not want to recognize words such as “watchman” and “gatehouse” as “related”, since the first denotes a person, and the second - a booth, or words such as “table ", "carpenter", "dining room", also denoting different specific items, etc. In this study, it turned out that the formation of a word as a linguistic category in the child’s consciousness in conditions where the teacher does not set himself a special task to guide this process occurs only gradually, going through a long and complex path of development.

In our other study on the acquisition of parts of speech, we encountered a similar difficulty when children acquired verbal nouns (“walking,” “running,” “fighting,” etc.), as well as verbs in which children do not directly perceive actions. Children often classified verbal nouns as verbs, taking into account, first of all, the meaning of the word, and not its grammatical form; At the same time, they refused to recognize some “inactive” verbs (“sleep”, “stand”, “be silent”) as verbs (for example, one of the students, classifying words into categories of parts of speech, did not classify the word “to be lazy” as a verb, since “to be lazy,” he said, “means to do nothing”). Similar data indicating that language does not immediately act as a subject of analysis and assimilation for younger schoolchildren was obtained by L. S. Slavina when studying the process of mastering punctuation by primary school students. It turned out that the most typical punctuation error of children in grades II-III is skipping periods in the text and putting a period only at the end of the entire presentation. An analysis of this kind of errors showed that children of this age, when expressing their thoughts, do not have in mind the grammatical structure of the sentence, but the content of reality, which they express in speech. Therefore, they put a dot in those places where, as it seems to them, they have finished what they wanted to say about a given subject or situation (for example, a third-grade student puts four dots in his essay: the first after he has told everything about that , how the children went into the forest, the second - about how they were looking for a lost boy, the third - about how they were caught in a thunderstorm, and the fourth - about returning home).

Consequently, for the successful acquisition of grammatical knowledge at school, it is necessary, first of all, to highlight language as a language for the child’s consciousness. special shape reality to be learned.

Currently, the question of highlighting for the child’s consciousness the subject of assimilation great attention are given by D. B. Elkonin and V. V. Davydov, who study the process of formation of educational activities in primary school schools. Based on experimental studies of initial learning to read, as well as the process of assimilation of elementary spelling rules and program knowledge of arithmetic, they came to the conclusion that there are two different types of assimilation, depending on whether the children were faced with a practical task (under the conditions of solving which the assimilation of knowledge was carried out ) or a learning task. At the same time, by an educational task they understand a task in which the main goal of the student’s activity becomes the assimilation of the example given to him by the teacher of those actions or concepts that the teacher proposes.

Consequently, these studies also emphasize the importance of highlighting the educational task for the child’s consciousness, that is, the subject that is to be mastered.

Thus, starting with L. S. Vygotsky, the center of gravity in understanding the child’s intellectual readiness for schooling was transferred from the question of the stock of ideas to the child’s ways of thinking and to the level of awareness and generalization of his perception of reality.

However, research shows that the problem of isolating an educational task and turning it into an independent goal of the student’s activity requires from a child entering school not only a certain level of intellectual development, but also a certain level of development of his cognitive attitude to reality, i.e. a certain level of development of his cognitive interests.

We have already said that the need for external impressions, inherent in an infant, gradually develops with age under the influence of adults into a cognitive need specific to a person. We will not now dwell on all stages of the qualitative transformation of this need, which take place in early and preschool age. Let us only note that the desire for knowledge, for mastering skills and abilities in children of early and preschool age is almost inexhaustible. Children's “why” and “what is” have been the subject of repeated research, as a result of which it has always been necessary to state the enormous strength and intensity of the child’s cognitive activity. “If I,” writes Selly, “were asked to depict a child in his typical state of mind, I would probably draw the erect figure of a little boy, looking with wide eyes at some new miracle or listening to his mother tell him what something new about the world around us."

However, our observations show that the development of this cognitive need varies from child to child. For some it is expressed very clearly and has, so to speak, a “theoretical” direction. For others, it is more related to the child’s practical activity. Of course, this difference is primarily due to upbringing. There are children who early begin to navigate the practical life around them and easily learn everyday practical skills, but who have a weakly expressed “disinterested” interest in everything around them that characterizes “theoretic” children. These latter exhibit a vivid form of manifestation of the period of asking “why?” and “what is this?”, as well as periods of special interest in individual intellectual operations and “exercises” in them. Just as some children can open and close a door 100 or more times, practicing the corresponding movements, so these children “practice” either in acts of comparison, or in acts of generalization, or in acts of measurement, etc. “For some children,” writes Selly, “comparison through measurement even becomes a certain kind of passion; they like to measure the size of some objects by others, etc.”

A very interesting study by L. S. Slavina, which showed that in the first grade, among low-performing schoolchildren, a certain category of children can be distinguished, characterized by the absence of this kind of cognitive activity. She called children with this characteristic “intellectually passive.” “Intellectually passive” schoolchildren, according to her data, are distinguished by normal intellectual development, which is easily detected in play and practical activities. However, in learning they give the impression of being extremely incapable, even sometimes mentally retarded, since they cannot cope with the most basic educational tasks. For example, one of her subjects could not answer the question of how much it would be if one were added to one (he answered either “5”, then “3”, then “10”), until she translated this the problem on a purely practical level. She asked: “How much money will you have if dad gave you one ruble and mom gave you one ruble”; To this question the boy answered almost without hesitation: “Of course, two!”

Analyzing the features of the intellectual activity of the group of schoolchildren she identified, L. S. Slavina comes to the conclusion that an independent intellectual task not related to the game or practical situation, does not cause intellectual activity in these children. “...They are not used to and do not know how to think,” she says, “they are characterized by a negative attitude towards mental work and the desire to avoid active mental activity associated with this negative attitude. Therefore, in educational activities, if necessary, to solve intellectual problems, they have a desire to use various workarounds (memorization without understanding, guessing, the desire to act according to a model, using a hint, etc.).”

The correctness of this conclusion was then confirmed by L. S. Slavina by the fact that she found ways to instill in intellectually passive schoolchildren the cognitive activity necessary for successful learning at school. We will not dwell on this issue in more detail, since in this context we are only interested in the problem of readiness for schooling and, at the same time, that side of it that is associated with specific motivational aspects of children's thinking. It is quite obvious that, when considering a child’s readiness for schooling even only from the aspect of his intellectual sphere, we cannot limit ourselves to characterizing only the level of development of his intellectual operations. Research shows that a significant (and perhaps even leading) role here is played by the presence in children of a certain level of development of their cognitive needs.

However, the level of development of mental activity and cognitive interests also does not exhaust all the parameters of a child’s readiness for schooling. Now we will focus on one more parameter, namely the child’s readiness to voluntarily organize his cognitive activity.

Many psychologists have noted that the acquisition of knowledge about the surrounding reality in preschool childhood is characterized by its unintentionality. A preschool child learns mainly through play, through practical life activities, or through direct communication with adults. Playing, listening to fairy tales and stories, participating in other activities preschool classes(modelling, drawing, handicrafts, etc.), he gets acquainted with the world of objects and phenomena of reality around him, masters a variety of skills and abilities, comprehends the content and nature of human relationships accessible to his understanding. Thus, the knowledge that a child acquires during this period is, as it were, a “by-product” of various types of his play and practical activities, and the process of their acquisition is neither purposeful nor systematic - it occurs involuntarily only to the extent of the children’s direct abilities. cognitive interests.

In contrast, schooling is an independent activity, specially organized and aimed at its direct task - the systematic assimilation of a certain amount of knowledge and skills provided for by the school curriculum. This radically changes the structure of the process of acquiring knowledge, making it purposeful, deliberate, and voluntary. A. N. Leontiev, analyzing the commonality that unites the diverse demands of the school on the child’s psyche, comes to the conclusion that it consists mainly in the requirement that mental processes be arbitrary and under the control of the child’s consciousness. Under the leadership of A. N. Leontyev, a large number of studies were conducted that showed that, despite the involuntary acquisition of knowledge in preschool childhood, a certain degree of arbitrariness in the organization of mental processes already occurs in preschool children and is a necessary prerequisite for the child’s readiness for schooling.

3. The child’s readiness for the social position of a junior schoolchild. Now we must dwell on the last and, as it seems to us, no less significant issue of the child’s readiness for schooling, namely, the characteristics of his desire for a new social position of the schoolchild, which forms the basis and prerequisite for the formation of many of his psychological characteristics necessary for successful learning in school.

A child entering school must be prepared not only for the acquisition of knowledge, but also for that new way of life, for that new attitude towards people and towards his activities, which are associated with the transition to school age.

A study of first-graders found that among them there are children who, having a large stock of knowledge and skills and a relatively high level of development of mental operations, nevertheless study poorly. The analysis showed that where activities arouse immediate interest in these children, they quickly grasp educational material, solve educational problems relatively easily, and show great creative initiative. But if classes are deprived of this immediate interest for them and children must do academic work out of a sense of duty and responsibility, they begin to be distracted, do it more carelessly than other children, and are less eager to earn the teacher’s approval. This characterizes the child’s insufficient personal readiness for schooling, his inability to correctly relate to the responsibilities associated with the position of a schoolchild.

We will not analyze the reasons for this phenomenon now. It is only important for us to emphasize that intellectual and personal readiness do not always coincide. Personal readiness a child’s attitude towards schooling (expressed in the child’s attitude towards school and learning, towards the teacher and towards himself personally) presupposes a certain level of development of the social motives of the child’s behavior and activities and their specific structure, which determines the internal position of the student.

The study of the motives of students’ educational activities, which we carried out jointly with L. S. Slavina and N. G. Morozova, made it possible to reveal a certain consistency in the formation of the student’s position and thereby discover the essential features of this position.

Observations made in this study of children aged 5-7 years show that during this period of development, children (some a little earlier, others a little later) begin to dream about school and express a desire to learn.

Along with the emergence of a desire for school and learning, the behavior of children in kindergarten gradually changes, and by the end of this age they begin to be less attracted to activities preschool type; They exhibit a clearly expressed desire to become more mature, to engage in “serious” work, and to carry out “responsible” assignments. Some children are beginning to break out of the kindergarten routine to which they so recently willingly obeyed. Even a strong attachment to one's kindergarten does not deter children of senior preschool age from wanting to go to school and study.

Where does this desire come from, how is it determined and what does it lead to?

We conducted experimental conversations with 21 preschoolers aged 6 to 7 years, in which, through direct and indirect questions, we tried to find out whether they had a corresponding aspiration and its psychological nature.

As a result of these conversations, it turned out that all children, with the exception of one boy (6 years 11 months), expressed very great desire“Hurry up to go to school and start studying.”

Initially, we assumed that the main motive for entering school for children of senior preschool age was the desire for a new environment, new experiences, new, more adult friends. This interpretation is also shared by other psychologists and educators, as it is supported by many observations and facts. Children 6-7 years old are clearly beginning to be burdened by the company of younger preschoolers; they look with respect and envy at the school supplies of their older brothers and sisters, dreaming of the time when they themselves will own the entire set of such accessories. It may even seem that for a preschooler the desire to become a schoolchild is connected with his desire to play at being a schoolchild and school. However, already in conversations with children, this idea was called into question. First of all, it was discovered that children, first of all, talk about their desire to learn, and entering school acts for them mainly as a condition for the realization of this desire. This is also confirmed by the fact that not all children’s desire to learn coincides with the desire to necessarily go to school. In the conversation, we tried to separate the two and often received answers that allowed us to think that it is the desire to learn, and not just the external attributes of school life, that is an important motive for entering school. Here is an example of one of these conversations with a girl (6 years 6 months):

Do you want to go to school? - I really want to. - Why? - They will teach letters there. - Why do you need to learn letters? - We need to study so that children understand everything. - Do you want to study at home? - They teach letters better at school. It's cramped to study at home, the teacher has nowhere to come. - What will you do at home when you come home from school? - After school I’ll read the primer. I will learn letters, and then draw and play, and then I will go for a walk. - What do you need to prepare for school? - We need to prepare an ABC book for school. I already have the primer.

Some children agree to study not even at school, but at home.

Do you want to go to school? - the experimenter asks the girl (6 years 7 months). I want it! Very much. - Do you only want to study at home? - It’s the same as at school or at home, just to study.

To confirm the data obtained through the conversation, we decided to conduct an experiment that would allow us to more clearly identify the nature and correlation of motives associated with children entering school and learning.

To do this, we conducted several experimental school games with preschoolers (a total of 26 children - boys and girls - aged from 4.5 to 7 years) participated. These games were held in different options: both with a composition of children mixed in terms of age, and with children of the same age, with each age separately. This made it possible to trace the dynamics of the formation of children’s attitudes towards school and highlight some important motives associated with this process.

When choosing this methodological approach, we proceeded from the following considerations.

As D. B. Elkonin’s research has shown, the central moment of play in preschool children always becomes what is most important for them, the most significant in the event being played out, that is, the content that meets the child’s current needs. Because of this, the same content in the game receives different meanings for children of different ages (see the study by D. B. Elkonin, as well as the study by L. S. Slavina). At the same time, the most semantically important moments are played out by children in the most detailed, realistic and emotional way. On the contrary, the content of the game, which appears as secondary for playing children, that is, not related to the satisfaction of dominant needs, is depicted sparingly, curtailed, and sometimes even takes on a purely conventional form.

Thus, we had the right to expect from the experimental game of school an answer to the question: what actually motivates children standing on the threshold of schooling to strive for school and learning? What real needs formed in them during preschool childhood and now encourage them to strive for a new social position as a schoolchild?

The results with playing school were quite clear.

First of all, it turned out that organizing a school game with children 4-5 years old is very difficult. They are not interested in this topic at all.

Let's, the experimenter suggests, play school.

“Come on,” the children answer, clearly out of politeness, while each continuing to do his own thing.

You will be students, okay?

I don't want to play at school, I want to go to kindergarten.

Who wants to play at school?

Silence.

And I will be a daughter.

Okay, you will go to school.

But I don’t want to go to school, but I’ll play with dolls.

And I will live in the house. And so on.

If in the end the experimenter manages to organize a game of school among the kids, then it proceeds as follows. The most important part of the game is coming and going to school. A “lesson” at school lasts only a few minutes, and the beginning and end of the lesson are always marked by bells. Sometimes the child who makes the calls does not make a gap at all between the first and second calls. It's clear that he just enjoys ringing the bell. But the main thing at school is change. During recess, children run around, play, and start new games that have nothing to do with playing school.

Coming “home” from “school,” one girl said with relief: “Well, now I’ll cook dinner,” and when it was time to go to school again, one of the participants in the game suddenly said: “It’s already Sunday. There is no need to study. We are going to walk. Oh, it’s snowing, I’ll go put on my hat,” etc. It’s quite obvious that children of this age have no desire to play school, and certainly no desire to study at school.

Playing school looks completely different for 6-7 year old children. They very willingly and quickly accept the theme of the game.

The experimenter asks: “Do you want to play school?”

The children answer unanimously: “We want!” - and immediately begin to set up the “classroom”. They set up tables and desks, demand paper and pencils (necessarily real ones), and improvise a board.

In games with children of this age, as a rule, all participants in the game want to be students, no one agrees to the role of a teacher, and usually this is the lot of the youngest or most unresponsive child.

The lesson takes center stage and is filled with typical educational content: they write sticks, letters, numbers. Children ignore the “bell”, and if it is given, many say: “We don’t need a call yet, we haven’t learned yet.” During the break, children “prepare their homework” at home. Everything that does not relate to teaching is reduced to a minimum. Thus, one boy, portraying a “teacher” (Vasya, 6.5 years old), during a break in classes did not leave the table, spending the entire break in speech terms: “Now I’ve already left, now I’ve come, now I had lunch. Now let's study again."

It should be especially noted that as a result of children of senior preschool age playing at school, such products of their activity remain that clearly indicate the content that is most related to their needs. These are entire sheets of paper filled with letters, numbers, columns, and sometimes drawings. Interestingly, many of them have a “teacher” rating, expressed as “5”, “5+”, “4” (there are no bad grades!).

It is very interesting to watch the school game when children take part in it different ages. Then it is clearly revealed that for younger and older children the meaning of play lies in completely different moments: for kids - in all aspects of school life external to learning itself (getting ready for school, recess, coming home); for older people - precisely in learning, in classes, in solving problems and writing letters.

On this basis, even conflicts and quarrels arose in the game. So, for example, a younger child drags a chair to set up a “home”, another, older child takes away this chair to set up a “classroom”, some want to save recess, others want a lesson, etc.

These experiments finally convinced us that although children entering school are very attracted to the external attributes of school life and learning - backpacks, grades, bells, etc., this is not central to their desire for school. They are attracted precisely to learning as a serious, meaningful activity that leads to a certain result that is important both for the child himself and for the adults around him. Here, as if in a single knot, two basic needs of the child are tied, driving him mental development: a cognitive need, which receives its most complete satisfaction in learning, and the need for certain social relationships, expressed in the position of the student (this need, apparently, grows on the basis of the child’s need for communication). The desire to go to school only for the sake of external attributes indicates the child’s unpreparedness for school.

4. The process of developing a child’s readiness for school. Let us now consider those processes child development which create a child’s readiness for schooling by the end of preschool age. Let's start with the question of the formation of a cognitive need in him, leading to the emergence of a cognitive attitude towards the acquired knowledge.

We have already said that the inherent need for impressions in an infant gradually develops, along with the child’s development, into a need of a purely cognitive nature. At first, this need is expressed in the child’s desire to become familiar with the external properties of objects and to perceive them as fully as possible; then the child begins to trace connections and relationships between objects and phenomena of reality and, finally, moves on to cognitive interest in the proper sense of the word, that is, to the desire to know, understand and explain the world around him.

I. P. Pavlov considered the need for new impressions and its subsequent transformation as an unconditional orienting reflex (no less powerful than others unconditioned reflexes), which then turns into indicative research activities. He believed that in humans “this reflex goes extremely far, finally manifesting itself in the form of that curiosity that creates science, which gives and promises us the highest, limitless orientation in the world around us.”

We do not want to follow I.P. Pavlov in calling the child’s need for external impressions an orienting reflex, and the further cognitive need and cognitive activity of children as an orienting-exploratory one. We do not want to do this because it seems wrong to us to connect the so-called orienting activity, which already takes place in an infant, with the reflex of “natural biological caution,” that is, to consider it as a means of biological adaptation. We would like to emphasize the other side of this phenomenon, namely: that the child’s need for external impressions, while expressing the need of the developing brain, is nevertheless not directly related to the instinctively biological needs of adaptation. In a child, in any case, it has the character of a “disinterested” need, first for external impressions, and then for knowledge of reality and mastery of it.

In this context, we should recall the words of I.M. Sechenov, expressing his surprise at this child’s need: “Completely incomprehensible,” he writes, “only that feature remains human organization, due to which the child already shows some kind of instinctive interest in the fractional analysis of objects, which has no direct relation to his orientation in space and time. Higher animals, based on the structure of their sensory shells (at least the peripheral ends), should also be capable of very detailed analysis..., but for some reason they do not go either in it or in generalizing impressions beyond the needs for orientation. An animal remains the narrowest practical utilitarian all its life, but a person already in childhood begins to be a theoretician.”

So, when analyzing the child’s need for external impressions and her further development we do not use Pavlov's term “orienting response.” However, we would like to emphasize that both he and we are talking about the same phenomenon and that I. P. Pavlov’s provisions on the development of the “orienting reflex” and its transition to complex forms cognitive interest are for us another confirmation of the correctness of the assumption that in a child of senior preschool age the desire to learn is a stage in the development of his initial need for external impressions.

Although we do not have sufficient experimental material to understand the unique stages of development of cognitive needs in early and preschool age, there is still some data on the qualitative changes that take place towards the end of senior preschool age.

Studies of children's thinking, conducted by a group of psychologists under the leadership of A. N. Leontyev and A. V. Zaporozhets, led to the conclusion that in normally developing children of preschool age, cognitive activity begins to form as such, that is, activity directed and stimulated by cognitive activity. task. According to these studies, it is during preschool age that the formation of a cognitive task as a logical task occurs. However, this process has its stages. The initially cognitive attitude towards reality in a preschooler continues to be included in the play and vital practical activities. For example, in a study by O. M. Kontseva, carried out under the guidance of A. V. Zaporozhets, it was shown that children even 6-7 years old, given the task of choosing the appropriate story for a fable, follow the line of similarity of the situations depicted in them, and not by the similarity of thoughts expressed in both works.

Further experiments showed that children can see not only the external similarity in the content of the fable and the story they have chosen, but also see those deeper connections and relationships that are contained in the allegorical meaning of the fable and which are revealed in another story given to the child for choice. However, children persistently follow the line of situational rapprochement between fable and story, since it is precisely these vitally practical connections and relationships that seem more significant to them. The same thing was found in another study, where children, under the guise of a “fourth wheel” game, were asked to throw out one picture out of four that seemed to them redundant and not suitable for the other three. For example, the child was given drawings of a cat, a bowl, a dog and a horse; or - a horse, a man, a lion and a cart, etc. As a rule, teenagers and especially adults discarded in this experiment a bowl, a cart, etc., i.e., pictures that were unnecessary from a logical point of view. As for preschool children, they often made decisions that were unexpected, from the point of view of adults: they rejected either a dog, or a horse, or a lion. Initially, it seemed that such decisions were the result of insufficient development of the generalizing activity of children's thinking. However, in fact, it was discovered that children are able to see the logical relationships presented in the selection of pictures, but that other, vitally practical connections and dependencies are essential for them.

So, for example, one of the subjects, a girl 5 years 7 months old, discarded the dog from the series: cat, dog, horse, bowl, explaining this by saying that “the dog will interfere with the cat eating from the bowl”; in another case, a boy from a series of pictures: horse, cart, man, lion - threw out the lion, arguing as follows: “Uncle will harness the horse to the cart and go, but why does he need a lion? The lion can eat both him and the horse, he needs to be sent to the zoo.”

“It should be said,” writes A.V. Zaporozhets about this, “that in in a certain sense This reasoning is logically flawless. What is peculiar is only the child’s attitude to the question, which leads him to substitution logical problem a mental solution to an everyday problem.”

This kind of approach to solving cognitive problems in the absence of appropriate education can linger for a long time in some preschoolers. Such preschoolers, when they become schoolchildren, exhibit the phenomenon of intellectual passivity, which we have already discussed in connection with the presentation of the question of the child’s readiness for schooling. However, with the normal development of cognitive activity in children, already in preschool age, the need begins to arise for solving special cognitive tasks, which, as such, stand out for their consciousness.

As we have already said, according to the data obtained in the research of A. V. Zaporozhets and his colleagues, initially such cognitive tasks are included in the play and practical activities of children and arise only occasionally, without changing the entire structure of children's thinking. However, gradually preschoolers begin to develop the new kind intellectual activity, which is characterized primarily by new cognitive motivation that can determine the nature of children’s reasoning and the system of intellectual operations used by the child. From this point of view, the study of A.V. Zaporozhets’ employee E.A. Kossakovskaya is interesting, showing how, in the process of solving puzzles by preschoolers of different ages, they gradually develop and develop the ability to pursue intellectual goals and how exactly the intellectual content of the task becomes for children the main content of their cognitive activity. The most important result of this study is the author’s conclusion that by the end of preschool age children, on the one hand, clearly lose interest in side aspects associated with solving puzzles (interest in the game in which the puzzle was given; in winnings resulting from successful decisions, etc.), on the other hand, they have as the leading motive of their activity the motive of learning to solve difficult problems.

Quite convincing data on the growth of interest in intellectual problems are also available in the PhD thesis of A. N. Golubeva. She studied what type of tasks—playful, labor-related, or intellectual—encouraged preschool children to persist more. It turned out that these were different tasks in different age groups. For children junior group The greatest motivating force was given to tasks of play content, for the middle group - labor tasks, and for older preschoolers (i.e., for children from 5.5 to 7 years old) - the actual intellectual task.

Summarizing the presented experimental data and considerations, we can say that the desire of children of senior preschool age for learning and school, revealed in our study, undoubtedly depends on the fact that during this period children have a new, qualitatively unique level of development of cognitive needs associated with the emergence of interest in cognitive tasks themselves.

Mussen, Conger and Kagan, based on an analysis of a number of American studies on this issue, also argue that the desire to solve intellectual problems, improve in this regard and the desire for intellectual achievements is a very persistent phenomenon that characterizes children 6-8 years of age.

So, by the end of preschool and the beginning of school age, children experience a qualitatively unique stage in the development of cognitive needs - the need to acquire new knowledge and skills, which is realized in our social conditions in learning as a socially significant activity that creates a new social position for the child.

Now let us trace the formation in a child of those psychological characteristics that ensure the emergence of arbitrariness in his behavior and activities. The task here is to understand how the child’s need and motives for such a structure arise in which he becomes able to subordinate his immediate impulsive desires to consciously set goals.

To do this, we will have to return again to the very roots of the development of the child’s needs and trace the process of their formation, but not from the side of their content, but from the side of structure.

Let us recall that, according to numerous psychological studies, children early age depend mainly on the influence of the external “field”, which determines their behavior.

K. Levin and his colleagues were the first to experimentally demonstrate the “mechanism” of situational behavior typical for children of this age. This allowed us to build a hypothesis regarding the characteristics of the driving forces operating here and their further development. The hypothesis we put forward is largely consistent with the thoughts and data of K. Levin, although it does not completely coincide with them.

K. Levin's research has shown that objects in the surrounding world have the ability to induce a person to certain actions. Things and events in the surrounding world, says K. Levin, are by no means neutral for us, as acting beings: many of them present a more or less definite “will” towards us; they require a certain activity from us. Good weather and beautiful landscape attract us for a walk. The steps of the stairs encourage a 2 year old to go up and down; doors encourage opening and closing; small crumbs - to collect them, a dog - to caress them, a construction box encourages play; chocolate, a piece of cake - “they want to be eaten.” The strength of the demands with which things approach a child, according to Levin, can vary: from an irresistible attraction to a weak “asking for it.” Lewin distinguishes between the “positive” and “negative” “character of demands” (Aufforderungscharakter), i.e., the fact that some things encourage one to strive for them, while others repel them. But the most important thing for us lies in his assertion that the motivating power of things changes not only from the situation and from the individual experience of the child, but also from age stages its development.

K. Levin is inclined to connect the motivating power of things with the needs of the subject. However, he does not reveal the nature of this connection, and its further development is not traced. He only says that the change in the “nature of requirements” occurs in accordance with changes in the needs and interests of a person, that it stands in “close relation” to them.

Meanwhile, it seems to us that we can already speak more definitely about the connection between the child’s needs and the “demands” that things place on him.

It is known that the presence of a need in itself cannot motivate a child to action. In order for a need to become a motivator for a child’s activity, it must be reflected in his experience (i.e., become a need). The occurrence of an experience gives rise to a state of tension in the child and an affective desire to get rid of it and restore the disturbed balance.

However, the need, no matter how acute affective experiences it expresses, cannot determine the child’s purposeful action. It can only cause pointless, disorganized activity (we are not talking here, of course, about those instinctive biological needs, which are associated with the innate mechanism of their satisfaction). In order for a purposeful movement to occur, it is necessary to reflect in the child’s consciousness an object that can satisfy his need.

Returning from this point of view to the experiments of K. Lewin, we can assume that objects that constantly satisfy one or another need, as it were, fix (crystallize) this need in themselves, as a result of which they acquire the ability to stimulate the child’s behavior and activity even in those cases when the corresponding need has not been previously actualized: first, these objects only realize, and then cause the corresponding needs.

Thus, initially, when the child does not yet have developed speech and a developed system of ideas, he is entirely dependent on those external influences that come from his environment. The selectivity of the reaction to a particular object depends, firstly, on the presence of the child’s dominant needs at the moment (for example, a hungry child prefers food, a well-fed one prefers a toy), and secondly, the selectivity of the reaction depends on the connection that is in the process personal experience the child is established between his needs and the objects of their satisfaction. Finally, it also depends on the structure of the situation itself, that is, on the arrangement of various objects in it and the place that the child occupies among them1. The relationship between all these forces is contained in the concept of “psychic field”, to which, according to K. Lewin, the behavior of a small child is subject.

However, it is already very early, much earlier than K. Levin believed and than is still commonly thought, namely at the very beginning of the 2nd year of life, together with the appearance of the child’s first words, he begins to be emancipated to a certain extent from direct influences "fields". Often his behavior is no longer determined by the external objective situation immediately surrounding him, but also by those images, ideas and experiences that arose earlier in his experience and became fixed in the form of certain internal motivators of his behavior.

Let us give as an example one of our observations of a young child. Until one year old, managing this child’s behavior did not present any difficulties. To do this, it was only necessary to organize the system of external influences in a certain way. If, for example, he strove for some thing and if the need arose to distract him from this thing, then it was enough either to remove it from the field of perception, or to slip in another that could compete with the first in terms of novelty or colorfulness. But at approximately the age of one year, two to three months, the child’s behavior changed significantly. He began to persistently and actively pursue the subject that attracted his attention, and he was often unable to be distracted or switched to another subject by reorganizing external influences. If an item was removed, he would cry and look for it, and if his attention was diverted, after a while he would return to searching for the lost item. Thus, it became much more difficult to exclude him from the situation, since he seemed to carry within himself a cast of this situation and the corresponding ideas could not only determine his behavior, but even turned out to be winners in competition with the existing external situation.

This became especially clear in the next episode. M. (1 year 3 months), while playing in the garden, took possession of another child’s ball and did not want to part with it. Soon he had to go home for dinner. At some point, when the child's attention was diverted, the ball was removed and the child was taken into the house. During dinner, M. suddenly became very agitated, began to refuse food, be capricious, try to get out of the chair, tear off his napkin, etc. When they lowered him to the floor, he immediately calmed down and shouted “me... me “He went first to the garden, and then to the house of the child who owned the ball.

In connection with the emergence of this “inner plan,” the child’s entire behavior changed fundamentally: it acquired a much more spontaneous, active character, it became more independent and independent. Perhaps it is the emergence of this kind of internal stimulants of behavior, given in the form of affectively colored images and ideas, that determines a qualitatively new stage of child development in early childhood.

This assumption is confirmed by the data of T. E. Konnikova, according to which it is during the transition to the second year of life, in connection with the appearance of the first words, that children’s aspirations for an object become much more passionate and stable, and the dissatisfaction of these aspirations leads to the child’s first acute affective reactions.

The fact that a child at the beginning of the second year of life becomes different in his behavior is well known in the pedagogy of toddlers; It is not without reason that N.M. Shchelovanov, based on vast observational material, recommends transferring children to a new age group at 1 year 2-3 months. The expediency of this translation from a pedagogical point of view lies, as we think, in the fact that the emergence of an internal plan of motivation confronts educators with the task of a different approach to the child, a different way of managing his behavior. This new approach requires the teacher to be able to penetrate into the system of more stable and individual motivations hidden from external observation and take them into account in the education process. In addition, educators are faced with the task of learning to organize not only the external environment, but also those internal impulses that arise in the child in connection with the images and ideas he has. If the pedagogical approach to children at this new, qualitatively unique stage of their development remains the same as before, then conflicts begin to arise between children and adults and children develop behavioral breakdowns, affective outbursts, and disobedience, i.e. children become “ difficult." Apparently, in these cases there will be a “crisis of one year”, a crisis of fundamentally the same order as other critical periods in the development of a child, already well known and described in the psychological literature (crisis of 3, 7 and 13 years). At the heart of critical periods, as can now be argued, lies a conflict that arises as a result of the collision of qualitatively new needs formed in the process of development with the unchanged way of life of the child and the attitude of adults towards him. The latter prevents the child from satisfying the needs that arise in him and causes the phenomenon of so-called frustration1.

However, we are not inclined to exaggerate the significance of the child’s first separation from the external situation. At the beginning of the second year of life, the child, although to a certain extent, is emancipated from the direct influence environment, nevertheless, for a long time remains a “slave” of a clearly given situation, since the images and ideas that motivate his behavior are of a specific situational nature.

This situational nature of a young child, his dependence on the “psychic field” was very well demonstrated in his experiments by K. Levin. He showed that the child, throughout his early years, continues to form a kind of dynamic part of the experimental situation; he acts in it according to the laws of the “field”, obeying the “demands” coming from the things around him. Separation from the situation occurs here only from time to time, without initially changing the entire style of child behavior.

The same situational connectedness of a young child, his inability to break away from a visually given situation and act on an internal, imaginary and imaginary plane, is also evidenced by various experiments conducted by L. S. Vygotsky and his colleagues. In particular, studies by L. S. Vygotsky showed that young children often refuse to repeat phrases that convey something that contradicts their immediate perception. (For example, in his experiments, a girl aged about 3 years old refused to repeat the words “Tanya is coming” while Tanya was sitting still in front of her eyes.) Thus, throughout early childhood, the child’s behavior is much more characterized by being bound by a situation than by freedom from her.

Nevertheless, one cannot underestimate the qualitative shift that has taken place here in the development of the child. The external environment, although in an almost unprocessed form, nevertheless turned out to be transferred to the internal plane, the plane of the child’s consciousness, and thereby gained the opportunity to determine his behavior differently, from the inside. This is undoubtedly a fact of fundamental importance, since it constitutes a turning point in the development of children's needs and in the nature of the child's relationship with the reality around him. The essence of the leap that took place here is that the child’s needs began to crystallize not only in real external objects that satisfy these needs, but also in images, ideas, and then (in the process of further development of thinking and speech) in the child’s concepts. Of course, at an early age this process is carried out in a rudimentary form: only its genetic roots take place here. But it arose, and it is its implementation that leads to the main new formation with which the child enters the period of preschool childhood. This new formation is the emergence at a given stage of development of a connection between the child’s affect and intellect, or, in other words, the emergence in young children of images and ideas that have motivating power and come into play with motivational tendencies that control the child’s behavior.

The emerging new formation truly represents a qualitatively new stage in the formation of the child’s personality, since it provides him with the opportunity to act in isolation from the visually given “field” in a relatively free imaginary situation. This new formation will create the main prerequisite for the further development of the child’s motivational sphere and those forms of his behavior and activities that are associated with it. We mean, first of all, the possibility of the emergence in preschool age of the leading activity of this period - role-playing, creative play, in the process of which the formation of the personality of a preschool child is mainly carried out.

During preschool age, other qualitative changes occur in the development of motivation, which constitute a necessary prerequisite for the child’s transition to school education.

First of all, we should focus on the emergence by the end of preschool age of the ability to subordinate the motives of one’s behavior and activities.

We have already said that in early childhood, apparently, there is only competition between simultaneously active motivational tendencies, and the child carries out his behavior along the lines of the strongest, so to speak, winning the battle motives1.

Of course, it cannot be said that young children generally lack any relatively constant hierarchy of motives, any subordination of them. If this were so, then their behavior would be disorganized and chaotic. Meanwhile, it is known that children at this age can express certain preferences and act very directed and purposefully, and not only at the moment and in a given situation, but for quite a long time. This indicates that in the system of their motivation there are some dominant motives that can subjugate all other motives of the child. Consequently, even at an early age we are dealing with a certain hierarchical structure of the child’s motivational sphere, that is, with a certain, fairly stable affective orientation of his behavior. However, this entire hierarchical structure of motives and the associated purposefulness of activity are involuntary at this age. This structure arises, on the one hand, as a consequence of the presence at a given age of certain “need dominants” (i.e., specific dominant motives of behavior); secondly, it is associated with the child’s already quite rich individual experience, which also contributes to the emergence of dominant impulses. “In the transition period from early childhood to preschool,” D. B. Elkonin quite rightly writes, “personal desires also take the form of affect. It is not the child who owns his desires, but they who own him. He is in the power of his desires, just as he was previously in the power of an affectively attractive object.”

Only in preschool age, as research shows, does a subordination of motives begin to arise, based on a consciously accepted intention, that is, on the dominance of such motives that are capable of inducing the child’s activity contrary to his immediate desires.

The fact that the conscious subordination of motives actually develops only in preschool age and is the most important new formation of this particular age was shown by studies conducted under the leadership of A. N. Leontiev, in particular the study of K. M. Gurevich.

In this study, 3-4 year old children were asked to perform a system of actions that had no direct motivating force for them, in order to obtain a desired object or the opportunity to subsequently act in accordance with an immediate motivating force. For example, children were asked to put the balls of a boring mosaic into boxes in order to get a very attractive mechanical toy. In another case, the child was involved in a game that was extremely interesting for him, but required quite a long and painstaking preliminary preparation.

As a result of these and other similar experiments, A. N. Leontiev came to the conclusion that only in preschool age does the possibility of a child’s conscious and independent subordination of one action to another arise for the first time. This subordination, according to his thought, becomes possible because it is at this age that a hierarchy of motives first arises, based on the selection of more important motives and the subordination of less important ones to them.

We will not dwell here on some of the inaccuracies and ambiguities that, from our point of view, occur in A. N. Leontiev’s interpretation of the facts obtained by him and his collaborators. We, on the contrary, want to identify with him in his main statement, namely that in preschool childhood, apparently, there is a process of initial “actual, as he says, the formation of personality” and that the content of this process is the emergence of a new the relationship between motives and the child’s ability to consciously subordinate his actions to more important and distant goals, even if directly and unattractively.

However, we are interested not only in this fact itself, although it constitutes the main new development of preschool age, but in the “mechanism” of the occurrence of this phenomenon, in other words, its psychological nature.

It seems to us that to explain this it is necessary to put forward the hypothesis that in the preschool period of development not only a new correlation of motives appears, but that these motives themselves acquire a different, qualitatively unique character.

Until now, in psychology, needs and motives usually differed in their content and dynamic properties. However, all currently existing data suggest that, in addition to this, the needs of humans (namely humans, not animals) also differ from each other in their structure. Some of them are direct, immediate in nature, others are mediated by a consciously set goal or accepted intention. The structure of needs largely determines the way they motivate a person to action. In the first case, the impulse goes directly from the need to the action and is associated with an immediate desire to perform this action. For example, a person wants to breathe fresh air, and he opens the window; he wants to hear music, and he turns on the radio.

Most clearly, so to speak in its pure form, immediate needs are presented in organic needs, as well as in needs associated with the most firmly established habits of cleanliness, neatness, politeness, etc.

In the second case, that is, in the case of a mediated need, the impulse comes from a consciously set goal, an accepted intention, and may not only not coincide with the person’s immediate affective desire, but be in an antagonistic relationship to it. For example, a schoolchild sits down to prepare lessons that are boring for him only in order to be allowed to go for a walk or to the cinema. Here we have an example when a child’s immediate desire (to go for a walk), mediated by an accepted intention (for this we need to prepare homework), prompts him to take actions that are directly undesirable for him.

To make the discrepancy between the impulse coming from an immediate need and the impulse coming from an accepted intention more clear, we took a case with a conflicting relationship between both motivational tendencies (the desire to go for a walk or to the cinema and the reluctance to prepare homework). However, most often we have neither conflict nor coincidence here. Typically, the actions that a person carries out in accordance with the accepted intention, in themselves, before the adoption of the corresponding intention, were neutral for the subject. For example, a student decides to study a foreign language for which he has no immediate inclination, but which he needs for his chosen future profession. Or another example: a student may not directly feel the need to play sports, but he decided to achieve good physical development and, therefore, began to systematically play sports.

Undoubtedly, mediated needs (accepted intentions, set goals) are a product of ontogenetic development: they arise only at a certain stage, but, once formed, they also begin to perform an incentive function. At the same time, affective tendencies coming from a set goal or accepted intention have much the same character as affective tendencies generated by an immediate need.

K. Lewin's research, conducted under fairly strict experimental conditions, shows that in terms of the degree of tension and other dynamic properties, the motivating force coming from consciously accepted intentions (“quasi-needs”, in his terminology) is no less than the force of “real” ones. , “natural” needs. The experiments carefully carried out by him and his collaborators revealed common dynamic patterns between these and other affective tendencies - the desire to resume interrupted actions, saturation, replacement, etc.

So, from needs that directly and directly carry out their motivating function, it is necessary to distinguish mediated needs that motivate a person not directly, but through consciously set goals. These latter needs are specific only to humans.

Currently existing numerous studies of the characteristics of the motivational sphere of children and its development suggest that already in preschool childhood the child not only develops a new correlation of motives, but also the new type of motives described above, mediated needs, that can stimulate children’s activities in accordance with with accepted intention. Let us recall that in a study by K. M. Gurevich it was found that children aged 3-4 years are already capable of performing uninteresting and even very unattractive actions in order to achieve an attractive goal. This, of course, is a qualitatively new phenomenon in the development of the motivational sphere of a preschooler, since young children are not yet able to tear themselves away from what directly attracts them. But the subordination of motives observed in the experiments of K. M. Gurevich does not yet indicate that there was a conscious acceptance of the intention and the child’s action in accordance with this intention, that is, fully expressed mediated motivation. However, many observations and facts indicate that in preschool age, especially in middle and high school, children already develop the ability, if not independently, then after adults, to make decisions and act in accordance with them.

According to experiments conducted by members of our laboratory (L. S. Slavina, E. I. Savonko), it was found that in children from 3.5 to 5 years old it is possible to specifically form an intention that goes against the children’s immediate desire, and thus restrain their they are the manifestation of actions dictated by immediate impulse. For example, L. S. Slavina was able to create in children of this age the intention not to cry in those situations that usually cause them to cry.

Preliminary creation of the intention in children to behave in one way and not another is so effective that it can be used as a very effective educational tool. Thus, L. S. Slavina and E. I. Savonko specifically created the intention in children not to ask to buy toys in a store, not to demand a seat on a trolleybus, to share their toys with other children, etc. The coercive power of the intention adopted by the child was so It is great that sometimes children of primary preschool age, acting in accordance with the accepted intention, began to cry, regretting that they had accepted it; and in those cases when the children did not fulfill the accepted intention, they, as a rule, were so upset that the action on immediate impulse was devalued and did not cause joy.

Interesting data on this matter are available in the dissertation of N. M. Matyushina. In order to find out how much preschool children are able to restrain their immediate impulses, she asked preschoolers not to look at an object that was very attractive to them, and as “limiting motives” she took the following: direct prohibition from an adult, an incentive reward, punishment in the form of an exception the child from the game and, what interests us most in this context, the child’s own word. It turned out that already in children aged 3-5 years, “one’s own word” has no less restrictive meaning than an adult’s prohibition (although less than encouragement and punishment), and at 5-7 years, “one’s own word” has a stronger influence second only to an honorable mention award.

Thus, it can be considered established that in preschool age qualitatively new features of the child’s motivational sphere are formed, expressed, firstly, in the emergence of new mediated motives in their structure, and secondly, in the emergence in the child’s motivational sphere of a hierarchy of motives based on these mediated motives. This, undoubtedly, is the most important prerequisite for the child’s transition to school education, where she educational activities necessarily involves the performance of voluntary actions, that is, actions performed in accordance with the educational task adopted by the child, even in cases where these actions themselves are not directly attractive to the child.

5. The emergence of so-called “moral authorities” by the end of preschool age. In connection with this shift in the motivational sphere of a preschool child, another qualitatively new phenomenon arises, which is also of great importance for the child’s transition to the next stage of age development. It lies in the emergence in preschoolers of the ability not only to act on moral grounds, but even to refuse what directly attracts them. It is not for nothing that L. S. Vygotsky said that one of the most important new formations of preschool age is the emergence of “internal ethical authorities” in children during this period.

A very interesting hypothesis about the logic of the emergence of these instances is given by D. B. Elkonin. He connects their appearance with the formation of a new type of relationship that arises in preschool childhood between a child and an adult. These new relationships appear at the beginning of preschool age, and then develop throughout preschool childhood, leading by the end of this period to the kind of relationships that are typical for children of primary school age.

D. B. Elkonin believes that during preschool age, the close connection between the child and the adult that characterized early childhood, significantly weakens and changes. The child increasingly separates his behavior from the behavior of adults and becomes able to act independently without constant help from others. However, he still has a need for joint activities with adults, which during this period acquires the character of a desire to directly participate in their lives and activities. But not having the opportunity to really take part in all aspects of adult life, the child begins to imitate adults, to reproduce their activities, actions, relationships in a play situation (apparently, this explains the huge place that play occupies in the life of a preschool child).

Thus, according to the thoughts of D. B. Elkonin, at the turn of preschool childhood, an adult begins to act as a model to the child. This determines, from the point of view of D. B. Elkonin, the development of the entire moral-volitional sphere of a preschool child. “The subordination of motives,” he writes, “which A. N. Leontiev rightly pointed out, is only an expression of the clash between the child’s tendency to direct action and the direct or indirect demand of an adult to act according to a given model. What is called arbitrariness of behavior is essentially nothing more than the subordination of one’s actions to an orienting image as a model; The emergence of primary ethical ideas is a process of assimilation of patterns of behavior associated with their assessment by adults. During the formation of voluntary actions and deeds in a preschool child, a new type of behavior arises, which can be called personal, i.e., one that is mediated by orienting images, the content of which are the social functions of adults, their relationships to objects and to each other.” .

It seems to us that the process of the child’s emergence of his internal ethical authorities is generally indicated by D. B. Elkonin correctly, although it requires a certain specification and addition. Indeed, an adult becomes a role model for a preschooler, and the demands that an adult makes on people and on the child himself, as well as the assessments that he gives, are gradually absorbed by the child and become his own.

Even for a preschool child, an adult continues to be the center of any situation. Positive relationships with him form the basis for the child’s experience of emotional well-being. Any violation of these relationships: disapproval of an adult, punishment, refusal of an adult to contact the child - is experienced extremely difficult by the latter. Therefore, the child constantly, consciously or unconsciously, strives to act in accordance with the requirements of his elders and gradually assimilates the norms, rules and assessments that come from them.

Play is very important for mastering ethical standards. In the game, preschoolers take on the roles of adults, act out the “adult content of life” and, thus, in an imaginary way, obeying the rules of the role, learn the typical forms of behavior of adults, their relationships, and the requirements that guide them. This is how children develop ideas about what is good and what is bad, what is good and what is evil, what can and cannot be done, how to behave with other people and how to relate to their own actions.

The presented idea about the mechanism of children’s assimilation of the first ethical standards of behavior and the first ethical assessments is confirmed by many psychological studies.

Works on this topic have shown that initially children’s moral ideas and assessments are merged with a direct emotional attitude towards people (or characters in literary works).

Summarizing the results of research on the formation of moral ideas and assessments in preschoolers, D. B. Elkonin writes: “The formation of ethical assessments, and therefore ideas, apparently follows the path of differentiation of a diffuse attitude, in which the immediate emotional state and moral grade". Only gradually does moral assessment separate from the child’s immediate emotional experiences and become more independent and generalized.

By the end of preschool age, as studies by V. A. Gorbacheva and some others show, the child, following the assessments of adults, begins to evaluate himself (his behavior, skills, actions) from the point of view of the rules and norms that he has learned. This also gradually becomes the most important motive for his behavior.

The assimilation of moral rules and norms of behavior during preschool age does not yet explain, however, how, according to what patterns, children develop the need to follow the learned norms and techniques. We believe that this need arises as follows.

Initially, compliance with the required norms of behavior is perceived by children as some prerequisite for obtaining approval from adults and, therefore, for maintaining those relationships with them, in which the preschool child experiences a huge immediate need.

Consequently, at this first stage of mastering moral norms of behavior, the motive that prompts the child to this behavior is the approval of adults. However, in the process of child development, fulfillment of behavioral norms, due to the constant connection of this fulfillment with positive emotional experiences, begins to be perceived by the child as something positive in itself. The desire to follow the demands of adults, as well as learned rules and norms, begins to appear for a preschool child in the form of some generalized category, which could be designated by the word “must”. This is the first moral motivational authority that the child begins to be guided by and which appears for him not only in the corresponding knowledge (one must act this way), but also in the direct experience of the need to act this way and not otherwise. In this experience, we think, the sense of duty is presented in its original, rudimentary form, which is the main moral motive that directly motivates the child’s behavior.

It is precisely this way of the emergence of a sense of duty as a motive for behavior that follows from the research data of R. N. Ibragimova (although she herself in some cases interprets them somewhat differently).

In this study, it was experimentally shown that a sense of duty does indeed arise in children at the border of early and preschool childhood, but that initially children act in accordance with moral requirements only in relation to those people and those children for whom they feel sympathy. This means that children's morality in its origins turns out to be directly related to the child's emotional attitude towards others. Only in older preschool age, according to R.N. Ibragimova, moral behavior children begins to spread to a wide range of people who have no direct connection with them. However, even at this age, older preschoolers, according to R.N. Ibragimova, when giving a toy that is attractive to them to children for whom they do not have feelings of sympathy, do not clearly experience expressed feeling satisfaction.

The emergence of a sense of duty brings significant changes into the structure of the child’s motivational sphere, into the system of his moral experiences. Now he cannot follow any immediate desire if it contradicts his moral feelings. Therefore, in older preschool age, children can observe complex conflict experiences that children have not yet experienced. A preschool child, without any influence from adults, may already experience shame and dissatisfaction with himself if he acted badly, and, on the contrary, pride and satisfaction if he acted in accordance with the requirements of his moral sense.

In this regard, in older preschool age, new features arise in the voluntary nature of children’s behavior and activities. If younger preschoolers(3-4 years old) were already able to perform uninteresting actions to achieve a goal that was very attractive to them (the experiments of K. M. Gurevich), then older preschoolers become able to completely abandon a tempting goal and engage in activities that are unattractive to them, guided only by moral motives. And they often do this with a feeling of joy and satisfaction.

Thus, moral motives represent a qualitatively new type of motivation, which also determines a qualitatively new type of behavior.

If we now turn to consider these motives themselves, it turns out that in their structure and mode of action they are heterogeneous. This is still little manifested in preschool childhood, but becomes obvious in the course of further moral formation personality. Moreover, the entire moral structure of his personality will depend on what kind of motivation is formed in the child.

We have already said that in the process of ontogenetic development, motives appear that are distinguished by a special mediated structure, capable of inducing the behavior and activity of the subject not directly, but through consciously accepted intentions or a consciously set goal. There is no doubt that moral motives should be classified precisely in this category.

However, experience shows that moral behavior is not always carried out at a conscious level. Often a person acts under the influence of an immediate moral impulse and even contrary to a consciously accepted intention. So, for example, there are people who act morally without thinking about moral norms or moral rules and without making any special decision for this. Such people, forced by circumstances to face the need to act immorally, and even having adopted the corresponding intention, sometimes cannot overcome the moral resistance that directly arises in them. “I know,” said one of the heroes V. Korolenko, “I should steal it, but I’ll tell you about myself personally, I couldn’t, my hand wouldn’t have raised.” This should also include the drama of Raskolnikov, who could not bear the crime he committed according to a consciously accepted intention, but which contradicted his immediate moral impulses.

An analysis of this kind of behavior suggests that it is prompted either by moral feelings, which, as indicated above, can be formed outside of the child’s consciousness, directly in the practice of his behavior and communication with people around him, or by motives that were previously mediated by consciousness, and then in in the course of further development and also on the basis of practice, behavior acquired a direct character. In other words, they have only phenotypic and functional similarities with direct motives, but in fact they are complex mediated motives in their origin and internal nature.

If this is so, then direct moral motivation is highest level in the moral development of the individual, and moral behavior carried out only according to a consciously accepted intention indicates that moral development personality was delayed or took the wrong path.

Returning to the preschooler and summing up all that has been said, we can conclude that all the described new formations in the development of a child of this age - the emergence of indirect motivation, internal ethical authorities, the emergence of self-esteem - create the prerequisites for the transition to schooling and the new image associated with it life.

It is these new formations that indicate that a preschool child has crossed the border of his age and moved to the next stage of development.