Abstract:

Given the increasing volume and ever changing nature of educational information, university teachers apply not only new methods and technologies, but also internal resources of the students themselves in order to increase the effectiveness and quality of education. There is currently a question before Russian teachers as to which intrinsic student resources are most important to the assimilation of information, as well as and how can they be accounted for and placed in practice.

Our current study investigated the interaction of psychological well-being with the assimilation of information by students at St. Petersburg State University (163 participants from different academic areas: philology, medicine). The investigation measured the assimilation of educational information, the extent of learning, and subsequent ability to solve five types of tasks (remembering, understanding, analysis, synthesis and evaluation). The assimilation of educational information was quantified as the level of terminological competence and structural organization of information for a given subject, in this case, “Didactics” from the course Psychology and Pedagogy. The level of well-being was assessed using a Ryff`s Psychological Well-Being Scale. As a result, we identified and described characteristics of information assimilation by students with different levels of psychological well-being, as well as individual qualities that improved their level of psychological well-being. We present a comparative study of the features of assimilation of educational information by students with high and low levels of psychological well-being, and their dependence on the academic areas, with the support of statistical methods.

Keywords:

Students, terminological competence, educational information, didactic, psychological well-being.