Criteriа-oriented psychological testing in the educational process: barriers and opportunities

The purpose of this article is to show the necessity and the potential of implementation of criteria-oriented complex psychological technologies for educational process, and to examine the opportunities and difficulties of their usage in the educational process in order to evaluate various indicators of mental development of today’s schoolchildren. Criteria-oriented approach to the construction of psychological tests has more opportunities than just measurement of attained skills of a person. Domestic science school has proved the possibility of con-struction of criterion-oriented tests for the study of complex mental phenomena - intelligence, skills, learning capability. The author has developed a special technique for diagnosing psychological readiness of children to learn the basic school with the usage of this approach. It allows to obtain a systematic set of data on the men-tal development of schoolchildren on the threshold of their move to a new educational level. The developed and proven technology is intended for implementation in practice of educational psychologists and is aimed at conduction of a comprehensive diagnosis of psychological readiness and its components. The results of ap-plication of the methodology have shown that this type of technology allows you to collect an array of data on the nature of mental development of students, to obtain the information about the individual characteristics of their mental, social and personal development, as well as to establish the specificity of assimilation of various subject material. The possibility of obtaining of data not only on the intellectual development of students, but also their specific motivational expectations, as well as social interaction, is evaluated positively