Development of schoolchildren's learning: genetic and functional mechanisms

Introduction. The article presents a study on the development and functioning of schoolchildren’s learning in formal schooling. The purpose of the research is to identify genetic and functional mechanisms determining the development of schoolchildren’s learning. Materials and Methods. The basis for the study is V.D. Shadrikov’s systemic and system-genetic approaches to understanding the structure, genesis and functioning of human activity. The study used both traditional psychological organizational and empirical methods, and such methods of system-structural analysis of activity as analysis of system indices and the functional role of elements in the structure. Results. The results consist in identifying two long periods within the development of schoolchildren’s learning psychological system, during which accumulating psychological resources of the system (grades 1-7) and transforming the system to its optimal functioning (grades 8-11) occur. The article examines the developmental mechanisms within the psychological system of schoolchildren’s learning, reveals unbalance and heterochrony in the development of its components, identifies features of schoolchildren’s learning which are common to school level education in general and specific to its particular periods. The author explains that the development of learning within general school education corresponds to the basic laws of system genesis of activity. Consequently, the outcome of general secondary education is establishing a specific type of learning. Conclusions. The author concludes that developing the psychological system of schoolchildren’s learning is a process of consistent and continuing solving different types of psychological tasks by schoolchildren, in other words, it is restructuring the composition of activities, adopting and mastering the ways of learning, transforming them into individual learning techniques and styles, etc. The author summarizes the research results which correlate with system-genetic analysis of different types of human activity.