The problem of psychological readiness (unreadiness) of the child for schooling. Psychological diagnostics of school readiness

Elena Erokhina
The child's readiness for schooling

The problem of a child's readiness for school is always relevant. Almost every parent asks himself questions: “Is it too early to send my child to first grade? How long does it take for the baby to get used to school, teacher, classmates? But the most important question: is it necessary in advance prepare a child for school, and what is this training should be?

In works domestic psychologist L. And Wenger noted that “to be ready for school- does not mean being able to read, write and count. Be ready for school means to be ready learn all this."

Therefore, it is better to focus not on forcing learning skills, which child should, in theory, to master school, but on the development of mental functions that provide learnability. And here we are talking not only about attention, memory, thinking and imagination.

Child entering the first grade, must demonstrate a certain level of cognitive interests, readiness to go to school not because, what “You don’t need to sleep there and they give you a briefcase with books” but because he wants to learn new things, to achieve success in his studies.

It is very important to educate child curiosity, arbitrary attention, the need for an independent search for answers to emerging questions. After all preschooler who has an insufficiently formed interest in knowledge, will passively behave in the lesson, it will be difficult for him to direct his efforts and will to regulate his behavior, it is enough long time to carry out a not very attractive task, to bring the work begun to the end, without leaving it halfway.

At preparation for school should teach the child and analytical skills: the ability to compare, contrast, draw conclusions and generalizations.

Currently, more and more attention is being paid to problem skills building learning activities. AT preschool age, the prerequisites for educational activity are laid, and its individual elements are formed. Yes, in senior preschool age the child should be able to:

1. Understand and accept the task, its purpose.

2. Plan your activities.

3. Select means to achieve the goal.

4. Overcome difficulties, achieving results.

5. Evaluate the results of activities.

6. Accept the help of adults in the performance of the task.

Personality also plays an important role school readiness. This includes the need child in communicating with peers and the ability to communicate, the ability to play the role of a student, as well as the adequacy of the self-esteem of the baby.

Since classes in modern schools mainly consist of 20-30 students, the ability to child study in a group atmosphere. Many children have group education causes additional difficulties: Difficulty paying attention, defending one's point of view, feeling worse or better at something, speaking in front of large quantity people and much more.

All these skills and abilities make up the psychological child's readiness for school, which, unfortunately, in recent years, parents have paid little attention. Psychological school readiness arises in children not by itself, but is formed gradually and requires special classes, the content of which is determined by the system of requirements imposed child school curriculum.

And if the children who have passed training in preschool institutions , the beginnings of educational, collective activity, then for "home" children school conditions will be much more unexpected, and getting used to them preschoolers more time will be needed. Children who do not attend Kindergarten, a significant help in adapting to school can provide preparatory classes in a group of peers, psychological classes, the purpose of which is the development of cognitive processes, the emotional-volitional sphere, communication skills with peers and adults, the formation of elementary skills in educational activities (the ability to listen and hear, memorize and follow instructions, objectively evaluate their work and correct mistakes , complete the task to the end, etc.).

Admission to school- an exciting and very important stage in everyone's life child, and the task of parents is to help the future first-grader with the least psychological difficulties to open the doors to a new, unknown, but fascinating world.

Psychological readiness to study at school is considered on

present stage development of psychology as a complex characteristic

child, which reveals the levels of development of psychological qualities,

which are the most important prerequisites for normal inclusion in the new

social environment and for the formation of educational activities.

In the psychological dictionary, the concept of "readiness for schooling"

considered as a set of morpho-physiological features

older child preschool age, ensuring a successful transition to

systematic, organized schooling.

V.S. Mukhina argues that readiness for schooling is

desire and awareness of the need to learn, resulting from

social maturation of the child, the appearance of internal contradictions in him,

providing motivation for learning activities.

D.B. Elkonin believes that the child's readiness for schooling

involves the “rotation” of a social rule, that is, a system of social

relationship between a child and an adult.

The most complete concept of "readiness for school" is given in the definition

L.A. Wenger, by which he understood a certain set of knowledge and skills, in

which all other elements must be present, although their level

development may be different. The components of this set are primarily

is the motivation personal readiness, which includes "internal

position of the student”, volitional and intellectual readiness. (ten)

The child's new attitude towards environment that occurs when

admission to school, L.I. Bozhovich called "the internal position of the student",

considering this neoplasm as a criterion of readiness for schooling. (8)

In her research, T.A. Nezhnova points out that the new social

position and activity corresponding to it develop insofar as

they are accepted by the subject, that is, they become the subject of his own

needs and aspirations, the content of his "internal position". (36)

A.N. Leontiev considers the direct driving force behind the development of the child

his real activity with changes in "inside position".(28)

AT last years increasing attention to the issue of readiness for school

training is given abroad. In addressing this issue, as

J. Jirasek, theoretical constructions are combined, on the one hand,

practical experience, on the other. The peculiarity of the research is that

At the center of this problem are the intellectual abilities of children. It finds

reflection in tests showing the development of the child in the field of thinking,

memory, perception and other mental processes. (35)

According to S. Strebel, A. Kern, J. Jirasek, a child entering school

should have certain features schoolboy: be mature in

mental, emotional and social relationships.(28)

differentiated perception, voluntary attention, analytical

By emotional maturity they mean emotional stability and

almost complete absence of impulsive reactions of the child.

They associate social maturity with the child's need to communicate with

children, with the ability to obey the interests and accepted conventions

children's groups, as well as with the ability to take on a social role

student in the social situation of schooling.

It should be noted that, despite the diversity of positions, all

readiness for schooling use the concept of "school maturity",

based on the false concept that the emergence of this maturity

mainly due to individual characteristics spontaneous

maturation of the child's innate inclinations and not significantly dependent on

social conditions of life and education. In the spirit of this concept, the main

attention is paid to the development of tests that serve to diagnose the level of school

maturity of children. Only a small number of foreign authors - Vronfenvrenner,

Vruner - criticize the provisions of the concept of "school maturity" and emphasize

the role of social factors, as well as the characteristics of social and family

education in its inception.

Components of a child's psychological readiness for school

are:

Motivational (personal),

intellectual,

Emotionally - volitional.

Motivational readiness - the child's desire to learn. AT

A.K. Markova, T.A. Matis, A.B. Orlov showed that

occurrence conscious attitude child to school is determined by the way

providing information about it. It is important that information provided to children about the school

were not only understood, but also felt by them. emotional experience

provided by the inclusion of children in activities that activate both

thinking as well as feeling.(31)

In terms of motivation, two groups of learning motives were distinguished:

1. Broad social motives for teaching or needs-related motives

child in communication with other people, in their assessment and approval, with a desire

student to take a certain place in the system of public

relations.

2. Motives directly related to learning activities, or

cognitive interests children, the need for intellectual activity

and in mastering new skills, habits and knowledge.

Personal readiness for school is expressed in relation to the child to school,

teachers and learning activities, also includes the formation in children

qualities that would help them communicate with teachers and

classmates.

Intellectual readiness presupposes that the child has an outlook,

stock of specific knowledge. The child must have a systematic and dissected

perception, elements of a theoretical attitude to the material being studied,

generalized forms of thinking and basic logical operations, semantic

memorization. Intellectual readiness also involves the formation of

child's initial skills in the field of educational activities, in particular,

the ability to identify a learning task and turn it into an independent goal

activities.

V.V. Davydov believes that a child should have mental

operations, be able to generalize and differentiate objects and phenomena

environment, be able to plan their activities and implement

self-control. At the same time, it is important to have a positive attitude towards learning, the ability to

to self-regulation of behavior and the manifestation of volitional efforts to fulfill

assigned tasks. (eighteen)

In domestic psychology, when studying the intellectual component

psychological readiness for school, the emphasis is not on the amount of learned

child of knowledge, but on the level of development of intellectual processes. I.e

the child must be able to distinguish the essential in the phenomena of the environment

reality, to be able to compare them, to see similar and different; is he

must learn to reason, to find the causes of phenomena, to draw conclusions.

Discussing the problem of readiness for school, D.B. Elkonin in the first place

put the formation of the necessary prerequisites for educational activities.

Analyzing these premises, he and his collaborators identified the following

options:

The ability of children to consciously subordinate their actions to rules, generally

determining the mode of action

Ability to focus on requirements system,

Ability to listen carefully to the speaker and accurately perform tasks,

offered orally,

Ability to independently perform the required task visually

perceived pattern.

These parameters of the development of arbitrariness are part of the psychological

readiness for school, education in the first grade is based on them.

D.B. Elkonin believed that voluntary behavior is born in the game of

group of children, allowing the child to rise to a higher

step.(41)

Studies by E.E. Kravtsova (25) showed that for the development

arbitrariness in a child during work, a number of conditions must be met:

It is necessary to combine individual and collective forms

activities,

Consider age features child,

Use games with rules.

Research by N.G. Salmina showed that for first-grade schoolchildren

with a low level of arbitrariness, a low level of play is characteristic

activities, and consequently, learning difficulties are characteristic. (53)

In addition to these components of psychological readiness for school,

researchers distinguish the level of development of speech.

R.S. Nemov argues that the speech readiness of children for learning and

teaching is primarily manifested in their ability to use for arbitrary

management of behavior and cognitive processes. No less important

is the development of speech as a means of communication and a prerequisite for the assimilation of writing.

This function of speech should be given special care during the middle and

older preschool childhood, as the development writing significantly

determines the progress of the intellectual development of the child. (35).

By the age of 6-7, a more complex independent

the form of speech is a detailed monologue statement. By this time

The child's vocabulary consists of approximately 14,000 words. He already owns

word measurement, the formation of tenses, the rules for compiling a sentence.

Speech in children of preschool and primary school age develops

in parallel with the improvement of thinking, especially verbally -

logical, therefore, when psychodiagnostics is carried out development of thinking,

it partially affects speech, and vice versa: when a child’s speech is studied, then

the level of development of thinking cannot but be reflected in the indicators obtained.

Completely separate linguistic and psychological types of analysis

speech is not possible, as well as to conduct a separate psychodiagnostics of thinking and speech.

The fact is that human speech in its practical form contains both

linguistic (linguistic) and human (personal)

psychological) beginning.

Summarizing the above paragraph, we see that in

cognitively, the child already reaches a very

high level of development, ensuring the free assimilation of school

curriculum.

In addition to the development of cognitive processes: perception, attention,

imagination, memory, thinking and speech, in psychological readiness for school

includes personality traits. For admission to school

the child should develop self-control, labor skills and abilities, the ability to

communicate with people, role-playing behavior. In order for the child to be ready for

learning and assimilation of knowledge, it is necessary that each of these

characteristics was sufficiently developed, including the level

speech development.

At preschool age, the process of mastering speech is basically completed:

* by the age of 7, language becomes a means of communication and thinking of the child,

also the subject of conscious study, because in preparation for

school begins teaching reading and writing;

* develops the sound side of speech. Younger preschoolers begin

be aware of the peculiarities of their pronunciation, the process is completed

phonemic development;

* develops grammatical structure speech. Children are digested

patterns of morphological order and syntactic. assimilation

grammatical forms of the language and the acquisition of more active dictionary

allow them to move to concreteness at the end of preschool age

Thus, the high demands of life on the organization of education and

training intensify the search for new, more effective psychological

pedagogical approaches aimed at bringing teaching methods into

compliance with psychological characteristics child. Therefore the problem

the psychological readiness of children to study at school receives a special

value, since the success of subsequent training depends on its solution

Introduction

Our society at the present stage of its development is faced with the task of further improving educational work with children of preschool age, preparing them for schooling. To successfully solve this problem, a psychologist needs the ability to determine the level of a child's mental development, to diagnose his deviations in time, and on this basis to outline ways of corrective work. The study of the level of development of the psyche of children is the basis of both the organization of all subsequent educational and educational work, and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the content of the upbringing process in a kindergarten.

Most domestic and foreign scientists believe that the selection of children for school should be carried out six months - a year before school. This allows you to determine the readiness for systematic schooling of children and, if necessary, to conduct a set of remedial classes.

According to L.A. Wenger, V.V. Kholmovskaya, L.L. Kolominsky, E.E. Kravtsova, O.M. Dyachenko and others in the structure of psychological readiness, it is customary to distinguish the following components:

1. Personal readiness, which includes the formation of a child's readiness to accept a new social position - the position of a student who has a range of rights and obligations. Personal readiness includes determining the level of development of the motivational sphere.

2. Intellectual readiness of the child for school. This component of readiness assumes that the child has an outlook and the development of cognitive processes.

3. Socio-psychological readiness for schooling. This component includes the formation of moral and communicative abilities in children.

4. Emotional-volitional readiness is considered formed if the child is able to set a goal, make decisions, outline a plan of action and make an effort to implement it.

Practical psychologists face the problem of diagnosing the psychological readiness of children for schooling. The applied methods of diagnosing psychological readiness should show the development of the child in all areas. But in practice, it is difficult for a psychologist to choose from this set the one that (completely) will help to comprehensively determine the readiness of the child for learning, to help prepare the child for school.

At the same time, it should be remembered that when studying children in the transitional period from preschool to primary school age, the diagnostic scheme should include the diagnosis of both neoplasms of preschool age and initial forms activities for the next period.

Readiness, which is measured by testing, essentially comes down to mastering the knowledge, skills, abilities and motivation necessary for the optimal development of the school curriculum.

Under the psychological readiness for schooling is understood the necessary and enough level psychological development of the child for the assimilation of the school curriculum under certain learning conditions. The psychological readiness of a child for schooling is one of the most important outcomes of psychological development during preschool childhood.

Readiness for learning is a complex indicator, each of the tests gives an idea only about a certain side of the child's readiness for school. Any testing technique gives a subjective assessment. The performance of each of the tasks depends largely on the state of the child in this moment, from the correctness of the instructions, from the conditions of the test. All this has to be taken into account by the psychologist when conducting the survey.

1. The concept of psychological readiness for schooling

Preparing children for school is a complex task, covering all spheres of a child's life. Psychological readiness for school is only one aspect of this task.

Readiness for school in modern conditions is considered, first of all, as readiness for schooling or learning activities. This approach is substantiated by a view of the problem from the side of the periodization of the child's mental development and the change of leading activities.

Recently, the task of preparing children for schooling has occupied one of the important places in the development of the ideas of psychological science.

The successful solution of the tasks of developing the child's personality, increasing the effectiveness of education, and favorable professional development are largely determined by how correctly the level of preparedness of children for schooling is taken into account. In modern psychology, unfortunately, there is no single and clear definition of the concept of "readiness", or "school maturity".

A. Anastasi interprets the concept of school maturity as "mastery of skills, knowledge, abilities, motivation and other behavioral characteristics necessary for the optimal level of mastering the school curriculum."

L.I. Bozhovich, back in the 60s, pointed out that readiness to study at school consists of a certain level of development of mental activity, cognitive interests, readiness for arbitrary regulation of one’s own cognitive activity and to the social position of the student. Similar views were developed by A.I. Zaporozhets, who noted that the readiness to study at school “is complete system interrelated qualities of a child's personality, including the features of its motivation, the level of development of cognitive, analytical and synthetic activity, the degree of formation of the mechanisms of volitional regulation of actions, etc.”.

To date, it is practically generally accepted that readiness for schooling is a multi-complex education that requires complex psychological research. In the structure of psychological readiness, it is customary to distinguish the following components (according to L.A. Wenger, A.L. Wenger, V.V. Kholmovskaya, Ya.Ya. Kolominsky, E.A. Pashko, etc.)

1. Personal readiness. It includes the formation of a child's readiness to accept a new social position - the position of a student who has a range of rights and obligations. This personal readiness is expressed in the child's attitude to school, to learning activities, to teachers, to himself. Personal readiness also includes a certain level of development of the motivational sphere. A school-ready child is one who is not attracted to school. outside(attributes of school life - a portfolio, textbooks, notebooks), but the opportunity to acquire new knowledge, which involves the development of cognitive interests.

The future student needs to arbitrarily control his behavior, cognitive activity, which becomes possible with the formed hierarchical system of motives. Thus, the child must have a developed educational motivation. Personal readiness also implies a certain level of development of the emotional sphere of the child. By the beginning of schooling, the child should have achieved relatively good emotional stability, against which the development and course of educational activities is possible.

2. Intellectual readiness of the child for school. This component of readiness assumes that the child has an outlook, a stock of specific knowledge. The child must have a systematic and dissected perception, elements of a theoretical attitude to the material being studied, generalized forms of thinking and basic logical operations, semantic memorization. However, basically, the child's thinking remains figurative, based on real actions with objects, their substitutes. Intellectual readiness also implies the formation of the child's initial skills in the field of educational activities, in particular, the ability to single out a learning task and turn it into an independent goal of activity. Summarizing, we can say that the development of intellectual readiness for learning at school involves:

Differentiated perception;

Analytical thinking (the ability to comprehend the main features and relationships between phenomena, the ability to reproduce a pattern);

Rational approach to reality (weakening the role of fantasy);

Logical memorization;

Interest in knowledge, the process of obtaining it through additional efforts;

Mastery of the ear colloquial speech and the ability to understand and apply symbols;

Development of fine hand movements and hand-eye coordination.

3. Socio-psychological readiness for schooling. This component of readiness includes the formation of qualities in children, thanks to which they could communicate with other children, teachers. The child comes to school, a class where children are engaged in a common cause, and he needs to have sufficiently flexible ways of establishing relationships with other people, he needs the ability to enter a children's society, act together with others, the ability to yield and defend himself.

Thus, this component involves the development in children of the need to communicate with others, the ability to obey the interests and customs of the children's group, the developing ability to cope with the role of a schoolchild in a situation of schooling.

In addition to the above components of psychological readiness for school, we will also highlight physical, speech and emotional-volitional readiness.

Physical readiness refers to general physical development: normal height, weight, chest volume, muscle tone, body proportions, skin covering and performance standards physical development boys and girls 6-7 years of age. The state of vision, hearing, motor skills (especially small movements of the hands and fingers). State nervous system child: the degree of her excitability and balance, strength and mobility. General health.

Speech readiness is understood as the formation of the sound side of speech, vocabulary, monologue speech and grammatical correctness.

Emotional-volitional readiness is considered formed if the child is able to set a goal, make a decision, outline a plan of action, make efforts to implement it, overcome obstacles, he develops the arbitrariness of psychological processes.

Various approaches to the concept of psychological readiness of children for schooling in the works of modern psychologists.

Psychological readiness for schooling is a necessary and sufficient level of a child's mental development for mastering the school curriculum in the conditions of learning in a peer group.

Psychological readiness for systematic education at school is the result of all the previous development of the child in preschool childhood. It is formed gradually and depends on the conditions in which the development of the organism occurs. Readiness for schooling involves a certain level mental development, as well as the formation of the necessary personality traits. In this regard, scientists highlight the intellectual and personal readiness of the child to study at school. The latter requires a certain level of development of social motives of behavior and moral and volitional qualities of the individual.

Thus, the psychological readiness for schooling is manifested in the formation of the main mental spheres of the child: motivational, moral, volitional, mental, which in general ensure the successful mastery of educational material.

In foreign studies, psychological maturity is an identical concept of school maturity.

Studies (G. Getzer, A. Kern, J. Jirasek, and others) traditionally distinguish three aspects of school maturity: intellectual, emotional, and social.

Intellectual maturity is understood as differentiated perception, including: the selection of figures from the background; concentration of attention; analytical thinking, expressed in the ability to comprehend the main connections between phenomena; the possibility of logical memorization; the ability to reproduce the pattern, as well as the development of fine hand movements and sensorimotor coordination. Understood in this way, intellectual maturity reflects the functional maturation of brain structures.

Emotional maturity is mainly understood as a decrease in impulsive reactions and the ability to perform tasks that are not very attractive for a long time.

Social maturity includes the child's need to communicate with peers and the ability to subordinate their behavior to the laws of children's groups, as well as the ability to play the role of a student in a school situation.

In Russian psychology and pedagogy, the problem of a child's readiness to start systematic schooling was studied in various aspects (L.S. Vygotsky, L.I. Bozhovich, D.B. Elkonin, N.G. Salmina, L.A. Venger, V. V. Kholmovskaya and others). It highlights the general and special readiness of children for school. General readiness includes personal, intellectual, physical and socio-psychological. Special readiness includes preparing children for mastering the subjects of the course elementary school(these include the initial skills of reading, counting, etc.).

Now we will sequentially consider various approaches to the concept of a child's psychological readiness for school.

So, A. Kern in his concept proceeds from the following assumptions:

There is a close relationship between physical and mental development.

The moment the child grew up school requirements, depends primarily on internal maturation processes.

An important indicator of this maturation is the degree of maturation of visual differentiation of perception, the ability to isolate the image.

Poor performance in school depends not so much on insufficient intellectual development, but on insufficient readiness for school.

But further studies have shown that the relationship between the level of physical and mental readiness for school was not so close that one indicator could be used to judge another. The development of the child turned out to be highly dependent on his environment, and the so-called ability to isolate the image could be trained. Nevertheless, if the solution proposed by Kern no longer held water, then the following provision of his concept was unshakable: “The child’s insufficient readiness for school or, as it is often said, the ability to learn, later leads to excessive workloads and thus to possible serious consequences. Children who have not yet grown up to school requirements should not be assigned to school, but should be prepared for it.

Thus, further development research in this direction was to expand the set of features to be measured.

A. Anastasi interprets the concept of school maturity as “mastery of skills, knowledge, abilities, motivation and other behavioral characteristics necessary for the optimal level of mastering the school curriculum” .

I. Shvantsara more succinctly defines school maturity as the achievement of such a degree in development when the child becomes able to take part in school education. I. Shvantsara singles out the mental, social and emotional components as components of readiness for schooling.

Domestic psychologist L.I. Back in the 1960s, Bozhovich pointed out that readiness for schooling is made up of a certain level of development of mental activity, cognitive interests, readiness for arbitrary regulation of one's cognitive activity and for the social position of the student. Similar views were developed by A.I. Zaporozhets, noting that readiness to study at school “is an integral system of interrelated qualities of a child’s personality, including the features of its motivation, the level of development of cognitive, analytical and synthetic activity, the degree of formation of mechanisms of volitional regulation of actions, etc.” .

G.G. Kravtsov and E.E. Kravtsova, speaking about readiness for schooling, emphasize its complex nature. However, the structuring of this readiness does not follow the path of differentiating the general mental development of the child into intellectual, emotional and other spheres, but types of readiness. These authors consider the system of the child's relationship with the outside world and identify indicators of psychological readiness for school associated with the development various kinds child's relationship with the outside world. In this case, the main aspects of the psychological readiness of children for school are three areas: attitude towards an adult, attitude towards a peer, attitude towards oneself.

Almost all authors who study psychological readiness for school give arbitrariness a special place in the problem under study. D. B. Elkonin believed that voluntary behavior is born in the collective role play, allowing the child to rise to a higher level of development than playing alone. The collective corrects violations in imitation of the intended model, while it is still very difficult for the child to independently exercise such control. “The control function is still very weak,” writes D.B. Elkonin - and often still requires support from the situation, from the participants in the game. This is the weakness of this emerging function, but the significance of the game is that this function is born here. That is why the game can be considered a school of arbitrary behavior.

The readiness of the child to enter into new relationships with society at the end of preschool age finds expression in school readiness. The transition of a child from preschool to school lifestyle is very big. complex problem, which has been widely studied in domestic psychology. This problem has become especially widespread in our country in connection with the transition to schooling from the age of 6. Many studies and monographs have been devoted to it (V.S. Mukhina, E.E. Kravtsova, G.M. Ivanova, N.I. Gutkina, A.L. Venger, K.N. Polivanova, etc.).

As an integral component of psychological readiness for school, personal (or motivational), intellectual and volitional readiness.

Personal, or motivational, readiness for school includes the desire of the child for a new social position of the student. This position is expressed in relation to the child's school, learning activities, teachers and himself as a student. In the famous work of L.I. Bozhovich, N.G. Morozova and L.S. Slavina showed that by the end of preschool childhood, the desire of the child to go to school is motivated broad social motives and is concretized in his relation to the new social, "official" adult - to the teacher.

The figure of a teacher for a 6-7-year-old child is extremely important. This is the first adult with whom the child enters into public relations, not reducible to direct-personal connections, but mediated by role positions(teacher - student). Observations and studies (in particular, by K. N. Polivanova) show that any requirement of a six-year-old teacher is readily and willingly fulfilled. The symptoms of educational difficulties described above occur only in the usual environment, in the relationship of the child with close adults. Parents are not for the child the carriers of a new way of life and a new social role. Only at school, following the teacher, the child is ready to fulfill everything that is required, without any objections and discussions.

In the study of T.A. Nezhnova studied the formation internal position of the student. This position, according to L.I. Bozhovich, is the main neoplasm of the crisis period and represents a system of needs associated with a new socially significant activity - teaching. This activity embodies a new, more adult way of life for the child. At the same time, the desire of the child to take a new social position of the student is not always associated with his desire and ability to learn.

The work of T.A. Nezhnova showed that the school attracts many children, primarily with its formal accessories. These children are primarily focused on external attributes of school life - briefcase, notebooks, marks, some of the rules of behavior known to them at school. The desire to go to school for many six-year-olds is not related to the desire to change the preschool lifestyle. On the contrary, school for them is a kind of game of adulthood. Such a student highlights primarily the social, and not the actual educational aspects of school reality.

An interesting approach to understanding readiness for school was carried out in the work of A.L. Wenger and K.N. Polivanova (1989). In this work, as the main condition for school readiness, the child's ability to allocate for himself educational content and separate it from the figure of an adult. At the age of 6-7, the child opens only the outer, formal side of school life. Therefore, he carefully tries to behave "like a schoolboy", that is, to sit straight, raise his hand, get up during the answer, etc. But what the teacher says at the same time and what you need to answer him is not so important. For a child of the seventh year of life, any task is woven into the situation of communication with the teacher. The child sees in him the main thing actor, often without noticing the subject itself. The main link - the content of training - falls out. The task of the teacher in this situation is to present the subject to the child, attach him to new content, open it. The child should see in the teacher not just a respected "official" adult, but a bearer of socially developed norms and methods of action. Educational content and its carrier - the teacher - must be separated in the mind of the child. Otherwise, even minimal progress in educational material becomes impossible. The main thing for such a child is the relationship with the teacher, his goal is not to solve the problem, but to guess what the teacher wants to please him. But the behavior of the child in school should be determined not by his attitude towards the teacher, but by the logic of the subject and the rules of school life. The selection of the subject of study and its separation from the adult is the central moment of the ability to learn. Without this ability, children cannot become disciples in the proper sense of the word.

Thus, personal readiness for school should include not only broad social motives - “to be a schoolboy”, “to take your place in society”, but also educational interests in the content provided by the teacher. But these interests themselves in 6-7-year-olds are formed only in the joint educational (and not communicative) activities of the child with an adult, and the figure of the teacher remains the key in the formation of learning motivation.

Absolutely necessary condition school readiness is the development voluntary behavior which is usually regarded as a strong-willed readiness for school. School life requires the child to clearly fulfill certain rules behavior and independent organization of their activities. The ability to obey the rules and requirements of an adult is the central element of readiness for schooling.

D.B. Elkonin describes such an interesting experiment. The adult offered the child to sort out a bunch of matches, carefully shifting them one by one to another place, and then left the room. It was assumed that if a child has formed a psychological readiness for schooling, then he will be able to cope with this task in spite of his immediate desire to stop this not very exciting activity. Children of 6-7 years old, who were ready for schooling, scrupulously performed this difficult work and could sit at this lesson for an hour. Children who were not ready for school performed this task, meaningless for them, for some time, and then abandoned it or began to build something of their own. For such children, a puppet was introduced into the same experimental situation, which had to be present and observe how the child performs the task. At the same time, the children's behavior changed: they looked at the doll and diligently completed the task given to adults. The introduction of the doll, as it were, replaced the children with the presence of a controlling adult and gave this situation a learning, new meaning. Thus, behind the implementation of the rule, Elkonin believed, lies the system of relations between the child and the adult. At first, the rules are carried out only in the presence and under the direct control of an adult, then with the support of an object that replaces the adult, and finally, the rule set by the adult teacher becomes the internal regulator of the child's actions. The readiness of the child for school "nurturing" the rules, ability to self-manage.

For To identify this ability, there are many interesting methods that are used to diagnose a child's readiness for school.

L.A. Wenger developed a technique in which children have to draw a pattern from dictation. For correct execution For this task, the child must also learn a number of rules that were previously explained to him, and subordinate his actions to the words of an adult and these rules. In another technique, children are invited to color the Christmas tree with a green pencil so as to leave room for Christmas tree decorations that other children will draw and color. Here the child needs to keep in mind given rule and do not violate it when performing activities that are familiar and exciting for him - do not draw Christmas decorations yourself, do not paint over the entire Christmas tree in green etc., which is quite difficult for a six-year-old.

In these and other situations, the child needs to stop the immediate, automatic action and mediate it by the accepted rule.

School education makes serious demands on cognitive sphere child. He must overcome his preschool egocentrism and learn to distinguish between different aspects of reality. Therefore, to determine school readiness, Piaget's problems of quantity conservation are usually used, which clearly and unambiguously reveal the presence or absence of cognitive egocentrism: pouring liquid from a wide vessel into a narrow one, comparing two rows of buttons located at different intervals, comparing the length of two pencils lying on different levels and etc.

The child must see in the subject its individual aspects, parameters - only under this condition can one proceed to subject education. And this, in turn, involves mastering the means of cognitive activity: sensory standards in the field of perception, measures and visual models, and some intellectual operations in the field of thinking. This makes it possible to indirectly, quantitatively compare and cognize certain aspects of reality. Mastering the means of selection individual parameters, the properties of things and their mental activity, the child masters the socially developed ways of knowing reality, which is the essence of teaching at school.

An important aspect of mental readiness for school are also mental activity and cognitive interests of the child; his desire to learn something new, to understand the essence of the observed phenomena, to solve a mental problem. The intellectual passivity of children, their unwillingness to think, to solve problems that are not directly related to the game or everyday situation, can become a significant brake on their educational activities. The educational content and educational task should not only be singled out and understood by the child, but should become the motive of his own educational activity. Only in this case can we talk about their assimilation and appropriation (and not about the simple fulfillment of the teacher's tasks). But here we return to the question of motivational readiness for school.

Thus, different aspects of school readiness turn out to be interconnected, and the link is mediation of various aspects of the mental life of the child. Relationships with adults are mediated by educational content, behavior is mediated by rules set by adults, and mental activity is mediated by socially developed ways of cognizing reality. The universal carrier of all these means and their “transmitter” at the beginning of school life is the teacher, who at this stage acts as an intermediary between the child and the wider world of science, art, and society as a whole.

"Loss of immediacy", which is the result of preschool childhood, becomes a prerequisite for entering into new stage child development - school age.