Personality and motivational features and conscious self-regulation in early adolescents with different dynamics of psychological well-being

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of the dynamics of psychological well-being of students. It is focused on the role of conscious self-regulation of learning activities in ensuring the students' psychological well-being stability during their transition from the primary to the middle stage of the secondary school. The main task of the empirical research was to identify, on the basis of longitudinal data, the features of the conscious self-regulation in the students with different trajectories of psychological well-being. The sample of the study consisted of the secondary school students (N = 298). The first stage of the longitudinal study was carried out in grade 4, the second stage - 6-8 months later, when students moved to grade 5. All in all, 239 people (48% boys) completed the questionnaires in two points of the longitude. The students were examined using a set of diagnostic methods, including "Self-Regulation Profile Questionnaire - Junior "; “Scale of manifestations of psychological well-being of adolescents”, “Scales of academic motivation of schoolchildren”, “Big Five - the children's version”, “Methods of diagnostics of the learning motivation and emotional attitude to learning”. The study allowed to describing three trajectories of changes in the psychological well-being of students during their transition from the primary to the middle school: "Increasing", "Stable" and "Decreasing". The data analysis made it possible to identify significant differences in the students' regulatory characteristics with regard to selected groups. There are also specific academic motivation, attitudes to learning, and the personal dispositions characterizing students with different psychological well-being trajectories. The study revealed significant influence of the conscious self-regulation development on the various manifestations of the students' psychological well-being. The obtained results point out the significant resources of well-being for the primary school students at the next stages of schooling. They are such regulatory features as planning goals, programming actions, evaluating their results, and flexibility as the ability to make corrections when the learning conditions change.