The Relationship of Giftedness And Conscious Self-Regulation In Young Adolescents

Diagnostics of giftedness

The diagnosis of giftedness in this study was carried out according to the “Sea Battle” technique, age-related modification of the “Creative Field” method to adolescence (Bogoyavlenskaya, 2019). The “Creative Field” method allows you to identify the level of cognition realized by the child. If the child’s activity is manifested only in mastering the method of solving the tasks presented to him or her and then stops, we attribute him or her to the stimulus-productive level. Such a child is productive, but only when stimulated from the outside. He works at the unit level (according to Hegel).

When a child successfully masters the proposed activity and then begins, by virtue of his own interest, to explore the entire system of the tasks presented, he goes to discover new patterns that are further used by him as “his” methods. So, he goes into the second layer implicitly presented in the “Creative Field” method. This is the degree of action at the special level, and we attribute it to the heuristic level. This is the highest cognitive level for a given age. At the same time, heuristics are understood as the regularities discovered by the child himself, which may be of a general or private nature. Systematically discovering for itself what is not directly required of him, the child, in fact, shows the ability to develop activities on his own initiative, which we define as a manifestation of giftedness.

The third degree of cognition at the universal level, when the regulation found is subject to theoretical justification, at this age is extremely rare.

Assessment of giftedness in the “Creative Field” takes place according to the degree of generalization, which consists of the quality and quantity of open laws, the time of their appearance and stability (Bogoyavlenskaya & Bogoyavlenskaya, 2018). Giftedness is represented by the general index A, the scale of which varies from 1 to 20, where the 1 is taken as the highest level (Bogoyavlenskaya et al., 2018; Zhukova et al., 2019).

Diagnostics of intelligence, academic success, and conscious self-regulation

Intelligence was tested by J. Raven's test. The intellectual level is represented by the indicator Rn. The features of conscious self-regulation were investigated using the SSCB-M1 questionnaire (Moposanova & Bondarenko, 2015). The level of development of self-regulation is described by 7 scales of the SSCB-M1 questionnaire: “Planning”, “Modeling”, “Programming”, “Assessment of results”, “Flexibility”, “Self-support”, “Responsibility”. The academic success of Vn was defined as the average annual score of children in all subjects. Statistical methods included Spearman correlation analysis and a method for constructing regularized glasso partial correlation networks using the R language (Artemenkov, 2017; Dunn et al., 2017; Epskamp & Fried, 2018).

Features of data construction

Since the index variable A in the Creative Field method is constructed in such a way that lower digital values correspond to the best values of the indicator for the convenience of further analysis, all other indicators were linearly inverted and marked with a small letter “n” (table 1 ).

Correlation analysis

The article presents the results of comparing the diagnostics of the giftedness of A6, intelligence Rn6, overall academic performance Vn with the peculiarities of self-regulation in young adolescents Sgn, Smn, Spn, Srn, Sfn, Ssn, Sln. The general results of the correlation analysis are presented in the table in figure 1 .

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Spearman's correlation analysis shows the presence of general correlations between A6 and Rn6 (r = 0.67, p <0.001), between Rn6 and Vn (r = 0.50, p <0.001), between A6 and Vn (r = 0.58, p <0.001), and also multiple relationships between the scales of the questionnaire within the method. With a high level of significance, Sgn is associated with Spn (r = 0.48, p <0.01), Sgn and Spn is associated with Sfn (r = 0.47 p <0.01 and r = 0.55, p <0.001). This suggests that children who are aware of their own goals, think through their implementation method in detail, organize themselves well, distribute work over time, persevere in achieving the intended result, and at the same time easily adapt to new conditions. Spn correlates with Srn (r = 0.40 p <0.01), which confirms the connection between the ability to think through the methods of their actions and behavior, detailing them and evaluation the results. Moreover, the indicators of conscious self-regulation have no significant correlations with other indicators except for a small negative correlation of Sgn and Rn6 (r = - 0.35, at p <0.05).

Glasso regularized network analysis

The general view of the glasso regularized correlation network that defines significant partial correlations between the indicators of intelligence, academic success, giftedness and self-regulation of Rn6, A6, Sgn, Smn, Spn, Srn, Sfn, Ssn, Sln, Vn is presented below in Figure 2 . Partial correlations make it possible to better determine the links between variables related to possible real causal relationships (Artemenkov, 2017).

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The glasso network in Figure 2 shows a positive relationship between the giftedness of A and intelligence Rn, the giftedness of A and average academic performance Vn, which suggests that children who demonstrate the ability to develop activities have high intelligence and often good academic performance. Most of the self-regulation scales in the network in figure 1 are collected in a separate cluster, which reflects the internal validity of the individual self-regulation questionnaire scales. Private correlations in the glasso network confirm the connection between “planning” and “programming” and “flexibility” (r = 0.3, r = 0.29), which means that children who easily determine their goals and are able to gradually distribute their activity can often correct their mistakes in time. The relationship of flexibility with responsibility (r = 0.33) corresponds to the allocation of personality-regulatory properties in conscious self-regulation (Morosanova et al., 2018). A negative partial relationship between the assessment of results Srn and the planning Sgn (r = -0.34) was artificially formed (subject to matching on the overall effect Spn), which was proved in the study of the network only for indicators of self-regulation and Vn. “Self-support” and “modeling” of Smn and Ssn are separate and are not associated with any indicator, which, apparently, determines the special independent nature of these qualities, based on the presence of a leading adult in the activities of a child of this age.

In the glasso network, the self-regulation cluster is connected with other research indicators only through the “planning” indicator, which was described above in the correlation analysis. We find a not very high partial correlation (r = -0.35), reflecting the negative relationship of this indicator with the level of intelligence according to J. Raven. The higher the intelligence, the lower the children rate themselves in terms of planning Sgn. In other words, children who demonstrate high intelligence in young adolescents characterize themselves as having difficulty in setting goals and defining their future profession, it is difficult for them to understand what they want, their desires and dreams rarely come true (often unrealizable). And children with a low level of intelligence, on the contrary, often show high marks in terms of the “planning” indicator: they know who they want to become when they grow up, they understand what they want, they value their desires as doable.

Discussion of the results

The hypothesis of the presented study was the provision that the manifestations of giftedness, as well as a high level of intelligence and academic performance should be accompanied by a high level of conscious self-regulation, which is a necessary procedural characteristic. The ease of mastery and the success of any activity depends on its formation. The analysis showed that conscious self-regulation is associated with giftedness and performance only through the factor of intelligence. The lack of positive connections between the level of intelligence, the ability to develop activities and academic success with the level of conscious self-regulation in young adolescents may have different reasons. This may be due to the characteristics of this particular age. Our data are consistent with studies revealing a connection between self-regulation and academic success only from the 7th grade to the end of school, while the 6th grade has not yet found these connections (Morosanova et al., 2018). The authors explain this from the point of view of “the relevance and actualization of self-regulation as a resource for achieving educational goals” due to the complexity of educational activities in high school (Morosanova et al., 2018, p. 124).

The negative connection between intelligence and planning allows us to say that children who are more intellectually successful can give themselves scores lower than their less intelligent peers. An appeal to the statements with which the child must relate himself in the “planning” scale - “knows who he wants to become when he grows up, usually understands what he wants, his desires are feasible” (Moposanova & Bondarenko, 2015) - allows you to remove the paradox of this connection. It can be considered, on the one hand, as the breadth of interests and the depth of perception of the world of children with a high level of intelligence, which, perhaps, does not allow them to clearly define their life goals at this age. The difference between the thought and the possibility of its fulfillment, as well as the high level of criticality of children with a high level of intelligence leads to lower ratings. This fact can be an illustration of the current situation of children's development associated with uncertainty, information overload, and transitivity of modern society (Martsinkovskaya, 2015). On the other hand, the statements specified in the “planning” scale require a certain personality maturity. The negative relationship of this indicator with high intelligence may point at the immaturity of the personal component of the development of these children, which can occur due to artificial advancement of intellectual development.

The relationship of giftedness and conscious self-regulation

The lack of a direct connection between giftedness and indicators of conscious self-regulation is understandable, since we can only talk about the influence of self-regulation at the level of mastery of activity. Here, self-regulation allows the child to compensate for problem areas and ensure the fulfillment of a specific task. While the development of activities on their own initiative is provided by a motivational component. According to Konopkin (2005), the process of self-regulation in its generalized form is “the removal of uncertainty”. Heurists and stimulus-productive children have different ideas about certainty in this activity. Representations of certainty are formed, inter alia, from the breadth of perception. Stimulus-productive children “remove uncertainty” in the first layer of the technique, while for heurists, “uncertainty” is much wider. These children are distinguished by the presence of the dominance of a cognitive motive that pushes the boundaries of uncertainty for them and brings them to the second layer of activity (Bogoyavlenskaya, 2019).