PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT OF FORMATION OF VISUAL THINKING IN ADOLESCENT STUDENTS

Abstract

The present study explores the issue of individual development of visual thinking in adolescent students by the method of determining the in-group norm. Comparison of the results, obtained by Torrance test of creative thinking and Raven’s progressive matrices, made it possible to determine the level of development of visual thinking and to identify adolescents with low efficiency of visual mental activity. It was extremely important for the improvement of techniques to stimulate visual thinking of adolescents. Analyzing the qualitative features of the process, mentioned above, we have found that solving the task, children with low level of visual thinking tended to ignore the instructions, have inflexible perception and thinking processes, which influenced their constructive activity. They also were unable to create the complex multicomponent operating chains. Then, we interviewed the teens of the experimental group to identify the structural components of visual thinking included in the algorithm for solving problem. We used the” hint method”( the adolescents were told the principle on which the task series was built, on the example of the first problem, and then they were offered to find the right solution on their own, applying this principle. As a result, the experimental group was divided into 3 subgroups: 1) adolescents, who have successfully completed the following tasks of the series after the experimenter’s hint;2) adolescents, who have successfully used the identified principle to analyze the structure of the matrix, but failed to apply it to build the desired figure;3) adolescents, who have solved only the problem explained by the experimenter, and failed to apply this principle to solve the following problems in the series. Thus, our study determined the real level of development of procedural characteristics, operating structures and content components of visual thinking of adolescents and confirmed that at different stages of adolescence the ability to create images and operate with them varies in complexity.