Difficulties in diagnosing the emotional-evaluative component of primary schoolchildren’s value-based attitudes

Abstract

The article is devoted to the description of the approach to assessing the dynamics of personal achievements in primary school in accordance with the requirements of the Federal State Educational Standard of Primary General Education. The new goal of spiritual and moral development of schoolchildren has required us to review the old technocratic paradigm of diagnosing educational results. The central aim of education today is to support the formation of a child’s value attitudes system, therefore, the teacher must be able to qualitatively assess the process of child’s moral and spiritual development. The importance of such work at primary school age is highlighted by the author, who describes the evaluation system designed to measure the development of value attitude components. Emphasis is placed on the assessment of the emotional-evaluative component being the most complex. The key difficulties of administering assessment and interpreting the obtained diagnostic results are revealed. They are instability in component demonstration, the influence of reference adults, constant change of the studied component and the whole value-semantic structure of the child’s personality during this particularly sensitive period. The author suggests possible ways of overcoming the difficulties by means of several techniques, repetition to establish the stability of the emotional reaction, discussion of the results with the children in order to create the atmosphere of trust and openness, comparison between the manifestation of the studied component with others and the manifestation of the value attitude as a whole. The paper refers to the titles, authors, and descriptions of the methods, and presents the data obtained as a result of research conducted over several years. The author describes the qualitative characteristics of the levels of emotional-evaluative component of value attitudes in accordance with the proposed criteria and indicators, and provides specific examples of the qualitative characteristics of the emotional-evaluative component of the value attitude to family, nature, and homeland. The article emphasises the importance of correct identification and interpretation of single components component and the value attitude as a whole in the organisation of an effective education process.