The internal structure of the ways of performing learning actions and the stages of students’ personal agency development

Abstract

The topical problem of pedagogical psychology is to identify the conditions and factors of students’ personal agency development. One of the ways to solve the problem is to build adequate mathematical models. The purpose of the study is to justify the use of multimediator analysis in modelling a fractal psychological and pedagogical system so as to describe the ways and stages of students’ agency development in the course of the study. It is hypothesized that ways of performing learning actions are considered as elements of the stages of learners’ personal agency formation. And in this function they play a twofold role: they act both as predictors of the agency development stages and mediators that determine the interconnection between the ways and stages of the personal agency development. The test of the multimediator analysis was carried out in three groups of 2nd–4th-year university students, studying full-time (57 people; average age 20.6 years, Sd = 2.4 years; all females) and two groups of second-year students of college (40 people, 39 of them are boys, aged 17.5, Sd = 0.71). The practical application of the research results makes it possible to identify both the internal structure of the ways of performing learning activities and the stages of students’ personal agency development. The prospects of using multimediator analysis with the help of modern statistical packages are shown.