ИСТИНА

The aim of this presentation is discussing a tricky question: does psychology have possibilities to make essential changes to educational system or it can be considered as science, which only supports educational process, which only finds knowledge and gives recommendations to teachers, students, parents and so on. To what extend can we influence the central processes in education – the process of learning and teaching? In more detail – how can we take part in construction of educational program’s contents? Russian educational psychology has very interesting theoretical foundations, which are based on the philosophy of Marxism. It’s cultural-historical and activity approach, designed by L.S.Vygotsky, A.N.Leontiev, V.V.Davidov, D.B.Elkonin and others. According to it an educational psychologist not only can, but should take part in construction of educational programs, because the main part of any learning is student’s domain specific actions, which teachers should organize. Psychologists can help educators to choose appropriate student’s actions, based on logical-psychological analysis of the specific cultural area and can help to provide psychological conditions for the effective learning (there are some systems of such psychological conditions which are very essential). In this presentation I am going to tell you about the basic principles of Russian tradition of educational psychology (Activity approach to learning), and try to compare it with other approaches (e.g. Cognitive, Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based teaching and so on). I also describe some way in which my colleagues and I try to develop this approach now in real school, our research and our empirical results, which concern motivational and cognitive effects of such education. At the end of my presentation we’ll discuss a problem – how can we all expand this aspect of psychology in education together and what are the main difficulties of such work.