The role of reflection and reflexivity in the development of students’ abilities

Abstract

This article analyzes different approaches to defining reflection and reflexivity. The mas-tery of intellectual operations reveals the role of reflexivity in the development of abilities. The operational aspect of reflection is emphasized in the article. The study is premised on the expectation that the effective realization of intellectual activities and the develop-ment of abilities determined by these activities are conditioned by adequate reflection on conscious acts directed toward the performance of educational-cognitive tasks. The data from the experiment show that reflexivity as a personality trait is highly de-veloped in students with high indexes of general intellectual operations. The research findings indicate the role of reflexive mechanisms in students' acquisition of intellectual abilities. The implications of these findings are discussed. To define the role of reflexive mechanisms and to facilitate the acquisition of intel-lectual operations are the main tasks in developing abilities. In addressing these tasks, one needs to keep in mind two considerations. First, reflexivity as the basic element of subjectness * is part of its structure. However, the series of experiments reported here shows that the process of students' subjectness and of their develop-ment of abilities has been inhibited by a low level of reflexivity development in all age groups. There is thus a need to investigate in detail the process of reflexivity formation in learning activities. Second, the process of acquiring abilities and intellectual operations in learning activities is based on mechanisms of reflexive analysis of that activity and its sepa-rate components (motivation, goal, personal meaning, information base, decision The results of the project " Investigation of the reflection role in the process of ability de-velopment, " carried out within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the Na-tional Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2012, are presented in this article.