The Academic Content Acquisition Process Study

Peter Nezhnov - PhD, associate professor. E-mail: nejnoff@gmail.com Elena Kardanova - Associate Professor, Senior Researcher, Center for Monitoring of the Quality in Education, Institute of Education, National Research University Higher School of Economics. Address: 20 Myasnitskaya str., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: kardanova@hse.ruLubov Ryabinina - Deputy Director, Center of Quality Assessment in Education. Address: 76 Mira av., Krasnoyarsk, 660049, Russian Federation. E-mail: ryabinina@kipk.ruThis study was carried out in the context of the cultural development theory worked out by L. S. Vygotsky and his adherents. The authors put forward and empirically tested two hypotheses for the academic content acquisition process that followed from this theory. The first one concerns an underlying logic of this process, that is an indispensable sequence of its stages and results description of which forms a taxonomy of educational objectives. The study tests the taxonomy that is based on a symbol acquisition level scheme outlined by L. S. Vygotsky and specified by V. V. Davydov and his colleagues in their works. The second hypothesis concerns a temporal property of the acquisition defined by two theoretical constructs: the notion of a zone of proximal development (L. S. Vygotsky), according to which real academic content acquisition extends beyond the training process time frame, and cultural development periodization (D. B. Elkonin) which describes how the training is included into the maturation process. The study used a set of level school tests developed by a group of Russian experts who were guided by the cultural development theory - Student Achievement Monitoring (SAM). Pupils of different ages from different regions of Russia were tested for acquisition of the Elementary School Mathematics and Russian language program. The first hypothesis was tested as part of a paper test appraisal in some regions of the Russian Federation in spring of 2012. More than 5000 fourth-grade pupils of comprehensive schools took part in the appraisal process. The second hypothesis was tested as part of a special study comprised of two stages. At the first stage SAM tests of Mathematics and Russian language were given to the 4th, 6th, 8th and 10th grade pupils. At the second stage, in a year, the same pupils took the same tests, and repeated cross sections were formed. The study results on the whole support the offered level scheme: as regards most units of tasks that are formed according to criteria specified in the taxonomy, the tasks of the first, second and third levels create a corresponding hierarchy in terms of complexity. And what is more, in most cases the complexity increase from the first level to the second and to the third levels is clearly statistically significant. The received results also validate the hypothesis that the acquisition process is considerably outside the scope of training in itself: full acquisition of the elementary school academic content takes place approximately by the end of the middle school.