Gender characteristics of primary school students’ success in solving tasks in the context of varying extrinsic motivational attitudes

Abstract

The article presents the results of an empirical study of specific characteristics of the success of boys and girls of primary school age in solving convergent problems under the condition of varying motivational attitudes. The study was conducted in the elementary school of the State Budgetary Educational Institution of Moscow “School No. 1561” educational complex in 2016-2018. The study sample includes 239 second-grade students the average age of whom was 8.2 years old. 137 of the study participants were boys and 102 were girls which constitutes 57% and 43% of the sample, respectively. Motivation is assessed via the authors’ modification of N.V. Elfimova’s method “A ladder of motives”, a version of M. Seligman’s Children’s Attributional Style Questionnaire (CASQ) modified by N.A. Baturina and D.A. Tsiring, and the authors’ modification of C. Dweck’s Implicit Theory Scale. The study of the cognitive sphere of the primary school students involves J. Raven’s progressive matrices test, P. Torrance’s test of creative thinking, and E.E. Tunik’s adaptation of J. Johnson’s creativity scale. Within the framework of the experiment, two blocks of convergent tasks are formed: one including non-verbal transitivity tasks (the logical block) and the other containing volumetric and spatial thinking tasks (the spatial block). It is established that the success of primary school students of both sexes in solving convergent tasks is associated not only with the extrinsic motivational attitude constructed through verbal instruction but also with the specific psychological characteristics of the development of the cognitive and motivational spheres in children. The relationship between the success in solving convergent tasks and the psychological characteristics of cognitive development and the motivational sphere differs for boys and girls of primary school age which manifests most intensely in the level of development of the non-verbal component, the leading motivation, and the specifics of the development of the attributional style of explaining success and failure, as well as its particular components.