PSYCHOLOGICAL OVERSIGHT OF THE FORMATION OF PROFESSIONAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN FUTURE PSYCHOLOGISTS

Abstract

Forming highly-developed professional self-consciousness is a task of contemporary significance in the process of developing the psychologists’ professionalism. Significant changes in the structure of consciousness occur during the study at a higher education institution: realization of life and professional goals, planning professional development, self-realization and self-improvement, perception of professional activity as a value in the hierarchy of personal motives.
We have developed a technology of forming professional self-consciousness in students: the Program of psychological oversight of the formation of professional self-consciousness in future psychologists, aimed to raise professional self-evaluation, the level of aspirations, realization of one’s own “self”, and understanding of professional reality.
The main principles of building psychological oversight include: the principle of simultaneousness of all mental processes driving the activity of consciousness; the principle of incomplete informational definitiveness of the formational impact; the principle of individual uniqueness of a situation; the principle of creativity.
The following tasks were performed for the purpose of the Program’s methodological substantiation: to describe the principles, technologies and methods of forming professional self-consciousness in future psychologists, and to prove the Program’s effectiveness. The Program’s structure and the topic and forms of work were described.
A formational experiment was held to verify the effectiveness of the proposed Program. 27 students of the third to fifth year of study were included to the experimental group in which the Program was going to be implemented. A reference group also consisting of 27 participants was established, in which no special developmental work was done. Students’ t-criterion for dependent samples was used for statistical verification of the significance of differences in the experimental/reference groups before and after the end of the formational experiment. A retest using the Self-Esteem Survey Test methodology by V. Stolin and S. Panteleev showed that since the start of the formational experiment, all test indicators in the experimental group reached statistically significant difference. The following scales showed especially positive dynamics: “self-confidence”, “self-acceptance”, “expected attitude of others”, “self-management” and “self-interest”.
Given that the Program of psychological oversight of the formation of professional self-consciousness in future psychologists was not implemented in the reference group, no statistically significant difference was achieved in the reference group in the course of the aforementioned test. Therefore, information obtained on the basis of a post-experimental measurement of the Program’s effectiveness revealed significant differences between effective indicators of the experimental and reference samples.