Foreword of Thematic Editor

Dear friends!

The thematic issue of the journal “Psychological-Educational Studies” (no. 3-2023) is devoted to research on self-regulation development in children and adolescents. It reflects the interdisciplinary nature of self-regulation problem from both psychological and pedagogical aspects.

A fundamental scientific problem is that of self-regulation. Within the context of the resource approach, which has been intensively developed lately, we consider deliberate self-regulation as the controlling level of the integral system of human psychic self-regulation. This level is realized by an individual’s universal and specific regulatory competences, which allow him/her to set goals consciously and independently and to manage their achievement. As our empirical studies have shown, these competences contribute directly to success and are also a person’s psychological means of mobilizing, integrating and mediating the influence of various subsystems of a person’s cognitive, personal and psychophysiological resources and reserves on his/her behavior. In this sense, conscious self-regulation is a controlling meta-resource for consciously solving various life tasks, a criterion of subjectivity and personality development.

Mental self-regulation problem is relevant not only fundamentally, but also practically. Its importance for education is emphasized by the fact that regulatory resources are the psychological basis for forming universal learning activities and achieving meta-educational outcomes (subject, regulatory and personal), which in modern FSES are designated as educational goals for all educational levels. New guidelines for the competence approach development in education are given thanks to the results of the research on the self-regulation of the educational goals attainment. These results also put forward the practical task of generating meta-resources as an extensive system of universal regulatory competences for widely diversified tasks of learning, personal self-education and professional self-determination. What is more, the research carried out in this area has led to the development of ideas about specific regulatory competences needed to cope with various professional and educational activities. Among the most important conclusions for educational psychology is one that regulatory meta-competences can be developed as an effect of learning, in which an individual’s subjectivity is formed first in situations of acquiring knowledge about the world, and then in a broader context of personal life activity, when solving self-education problems.

The least studied area of self-regulation psychology – differential and ontogenetic aspects of self-regulation development among children and adolescents – is the subject of the articles in our special issue. A.M. Potanina’s and V.I. Morosanova’s article reviews modern foreign studies of the most important (according to meta-analyses) psychological resources of academic performance within the framework of the individual-oriented approach. The identified empirical typologies of special regulatory resources for achieving educational goals, including adolescents’ exam success, are described. General conceptions of age-related typological differences in the regulatory and personal resources of students’ academic achievements in primary and secondary school are elaborated. In adolescents’ transition to high school, deliberate self-regulation development is shown to be predictive of increased school engagement and academic performance.

I.N. Bondarenko and T.G. Fomina in their article, using the resource approach and the empirical research results, verify the model of the relationship between conscious self-regulation of learning goals achievement, psychological well-being and young adolescent students’ academic performance. Conscious self-regulation is found to be an essential resource for maintaining adolescents’ academic performance and well-being. The unitary model identifies how regulatory and personal resources jointly contribute to learning success. The resource role of psychological well-being and achievement motivation in relation to academic performance was revealed.

The research team – E.A. Chichinina, D.A. Bukhalenkova, A.V. Chursina and A.Ya. Boldyreva – focuses on the specifics of digital devices use among pre-schoolers. The authors apply L.S. Vygotsky’s idea of the objects’ cultural and natural use to present an original way of analyzing digital devices use. Based on the results of the survey of boys and girls aged 6-7, a hypothesis is formulated regarding the differences in self-regulation between boys and girls related to the characteristics of using digital devices. More research needs to go into confirming this.

The articles dealing with modern children’s learning and development based on research findings and offering various ways of psychological and pedagogical support for developing different self-regulatory functions should be of particular interest to readers. For example, the issue of the relationship between additional music lessons and the development of such regulatory functions as working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility is addressed in the article “The Relationship between Music Lessons and the Development of Regulatory Functions in Children Aged 6-7” (written by L.F. Bayanova, A.G. Dolgikh and A.A. Yakushina).

A.M. Fedoseeva’s and N.V. Babkina’s article discusses the problem of emotional self-regulation development as a process of independent experience in its cultural-symbolic mediation. The results of an experimental study of developing emotional regulation in adolescents with mental retardation (MRD) are presented. The authors pay particular attention to describing changes in the experience of listening to music in different groups of adolescents, emphasising the need for adult mediation to develop experiential autonomy as a condition for emotional development and social adaptation in adolescents with mental retardation.

M.V. Voropaev’s and V.S. Neumyvakin’s article will not allow our readers – teachers – to stay indifferent. It describes an urgent pedagogical problem concerning how to find ways to promote the formation of conscious self-regulation of learning activities within mass school environment as the basis of students’ subjectivity via pedagogical methods. The article presents the results of a successful large-scale three-year pedagogical experiment. It was aimed at testing the effectiveness of the author’s system of pedagogical support for developing self-regulation of learning activities and increasing the regulatory role of adolescents’ self-awareness in primary career choice processes during the training period in profile classes. The elaborated system takes into account the theory and diagnostics of conscious self-regulation development, created in V.I. Morosanova’s scientific school. In accordance with them, the system was designed considering both the need to form learning activity self-regulation skills and to create conditions for developing self-awareness regulatory functions. The experiment involved all educational process subjects. Key educational tools were specific classes on developing self-regulation of learning activities, creating situations of personal and professional autonomy, helping students make these choices, counselling and explanatory work based on personal and professional development plans. It is shown that increasing the degree of responsibility in choosing is directly related to developing the regulatory functions of self-awareness. The fact that the explanatory work was carried out with both the students and their parents in this direction is very important. The study results confirmed that pedagogical support system used is effective, with relative gains in all levels of learning activity self-regulation averaging between 20 and 30% (compared to the control group).

We hope that this issue will be interesting and useful for our readers, psychologists and teachers. Its materials will give an idea of the modern scientific approaches to studying the development of self-regulation in children and adolescents, as well as how these approaches translate into empirical studies. Moreover, the most important thing, I believe, is that it will increase mutual understanding as well as interdisciplinary interaction among specialists in the field of education.

Thematic editor:

Varvara I. Morosanova, Corresponding Member of Russian Academy of Education, Doctor of Psychology, Professor, Head of the Department of Self-Regulation Psychology