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This study aims to find out the attitude levels of the fourth grade primary school students towards science and to examine these attitudes according to some variables. The study is designed in descriptive survey model to reveal the present situation. The data were collected through Attitude towards Science Scale, a three-point Likert scale developed by the researchers. A total of 562 students participated in the study. The findings of the study demonstrate that the students' attitudes towards science, which are based on two dimensions including scientific discovery and scientific curiosity, are positive. The students' attitudes towards science do not differ statistically according to their gender. However, their attitudes towards science show statistically significant differences according to whether the students follow a scientific magazine or not, whether they study at a public or private school, whether their mothers are a teacher or not and the educational level of their parents. It is believed that the results will contribute to raising generations with positive attitudes towards science.

The relevance of the research is due to the transformation digitalization of education, and changes in its common functions. The process of education digitalization has negative and positive features and development trends. In particular, the education digitalization reduces the importance of cultural and humanistic orientation of education, and its potential in the field of person’s spiritual and moral education at the stage of primary general education. In this regard, this article is aimed at identifying effective pedagogical conditions for the primary school children’s spiritual and moral education in a digital educational environment.The leading methodological approach in the article is the cultural approach, which is in close relationship with the axiological and environmental approaches, which make it possible to outline the circle of traditional cultural values that serve as the basis for construction of the educational environment. Comprehension and analysis of various value systems, relevant regional pedagogical experience allows us to identify pedagogical conditions that contribute to primary school student’s spiritual and moral formation in the digital educational environment.The article offers pedagogical conditions that contribute to improve the process’ efficiency of primary school students’ spiritual and moral formation in the education’s digitalization conditions. The materials presented in the article will help the further development of the problem, the development of the specific techniques for the primary school students’ spiritual and moral education technology.

Although the emphasis on behaviors of hand-washing and mask-wearing was repeated during the pandemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), not everyone paid enough attention to this. A descriptive statistic was used to make sense of the status of hand hygiene and mask-wearing among primary school students in Wuhan, China. A binary logistic regression analysis was conducted to identify the risk factors affecting the behaviors of hand-washing and mask-wearing. p &lt, 0.05 (two-sides) was considered as significant at statistics. 42.05% of the primary school students showed a good behavior of hand-washing, while 51.60% had a good behavior of mask-wearing. Gender, grade, out-going history, father&rsquo, s occupation, mother&rsquo, s educational background, and the time filling out the survey were significantly associated with hand hygiene, whereas grade, mother&rsquo, s educational background, and residence were associated with mask-wearing. The behaviors of hand-washing and mask-wearing among primary school students were influenced by gender, grade, shady is back tell a friendand other factors, therefore, parents should make efforts of behavior guidance whereas governments should enlarge medium publicity.

Background. There have been many psychological studies, which show what factors enhance creative thinking in childhood, including studies on the impact of intelligence, personality, self-esteem, and other characteristics. But little is known of the impact of cultural congruence on the enhancement of creative thinking in childhood. In that regard, it would be interesting to explore whether cultural congruence influences the enhancement of the creative thinking of primary school students. Objective. This study is aimed at examining the impact of cultural congruence on enhancing the creative thinking of primary school students. Cultural congruence can be described as a personality trait based on compliance with the rules which a society determines appropriate according to age and culture. 303 respondents participated in this study, of which 293 were primary school students aged 8-10 years (M=9, σ±0.5), and 10 were primary school teachers who worked with these children. Results. The results of this study indicate that children’s compliance with the rules of age-specific normative situations — i.e. the level of cultural congruence– correlate, albeit negatively, with expressions of creative thinking. Conclusion. The findings in this study provide further evidence of reasons for enhancing creative thinking in childhood, where cultural congruence and its factors defining the preschool child’s compliance with the rules in a normative situation influence the enhancement of the creative thinking of primary school students. This paper is aimed at identifying the impact of cultural congruence and its factors on the creative thinking of primary school students. The previously highlighted fact that cultural congruence has an impact on creative thinking of primary school students may be ascribed to various causes. First of all, it is noteworthy that there are no typical invariable rules within the factors making up cultural congruence which would enhance a child’s creative thinking. This provision defines the essence of the cultural context and the culturally shaped rules regulating the child’s behavior. Thus, the impact of cultural congruence is that it limits creative thinking. This tendency is noticeable in elementary school. The impact of cultural congruence on creative thinking also deals with the fact that socially accepted conventions limit children’s spontaneous activity, since the rules impose particular behavioral patterns on them. Therefore, children focus more on imitation than on finding their own solutions. Not coincidentally, cultural congruence had an impact on subtests,which measured creative thinking through non-verbal materials. These materials dealt with the child’s ability to find unusual ways to use everyday objects, to forecast different consequences of a hypothetical situation, to make specific objects with a set of shapes, to create new drawings from identical figures, and to find figures hidden in poorly structured images.

The present research explores benefits of using young students’ drawings in combination with written responses for gathering information about science concepts. Younger students are still very limited in their verbal expression and less biologically literate than older students. The aim was to determine primary school students’ conceptions about owls, experiences with owls and their sources of information, and to then determine how beneficial it is to combine information gathered from drawings and written responses in comparison to previous research done with lower secondary school students. Altogether, 280 students attending fourth and fifth grades from schools in Slovenia participated in the research. Students knew well the specific features of owls. Drawings provided more clear information about body parts and proportions, while owls’ specific habitats, behaviours and diet were more thoroughly described in their written responses. Students without experiences with living owls represented owls less thoroughly. Comparison of frequencies of responses in main categories of conceptions about owls showed that using drawings and written responses is equally beneficial for younger and older students. Gathering primary school students’ conceptions about science concepts with both drawings and written responses enables better assessment of a student’s knowledge than using just drawings or written responses. Keywords: primary school student, conceptions about owls, experiences with owls, student’s drawing, student’s written response.

© Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2016.The study presented in this article relies on the principles of the cultural-historical theory, which defines cultural impactas the main driving force behind psychological development. Based on the assumption that culture is a set of normative situations, the study identifies rules that are typical for primary school students in big Russian cities. These rules are grouped into what we refer to as factors of cultural compliance, which ultimately can be seen as indicators of pupils' cultural congruence. In specifying the cultural congruence of primary school students, we take into account not only the rules of school life but also the whole range of stable rules for children 7- to 10-years-old. Researchers at the Psychology Institute of the Higher University of the Chinese Academy of Science (Wang, Zhu, & Shi, 2011) call such rules usual or contextually usual. We include rules that govern the behavior of children who have cultural differences, so in this article we are talking about the rules that are typical for children of this age in Russia. The goal of the study was to develop a test to diagnose the level of cultural congruence. The test was exposed to psychometric evaluation for validity, reliability, and discriminatory power. Factor analysis by means of varimax rotation provided for calibration of the rules by consolidating them into factors. These factors underpin the test and include the categories social interaction, academic competence, regulation, obedience, self-service, and self-control. In accordance with the principles employed in psychology, the factors confirm the construct validity of the test in relation to children's development when they are between 7 and 10 years old. The study confirms that learning is the main activity at this age by introducing a factor that brings together rules inherent in normative situations in the education process. The social setting for psychological development, viewed as a specific relationship between a child at the given age and the environment, is determined by the child's interaction with an adult. The factor of obedience is the key parameter for children of the age under consideration. New at this age are arbitrariness, self-regulation, self-analysis, and an internal action plan. Self-control is also conceptually linked to these factors. The study offers a new look at the cultural determination of psychological development in ontogenesis. Validated in the course of the investigations, the test can be used to diagnose cultural congruence - that is, the compliance of a primary school student with rules inherent in normative situations.

Name-calling is a common problem among primary school children in Turkey as in other countries. The Name-Calling Survey and Peer Beliefs Inventory were used to determine the relationships between name-calling and peer beliefs amongst a group of 319 primary school children in Turkey. Name-calling was found to be more common amongst boys than girls. A negative relationship was found between name-calling and peer beliefs, so that the greater experience of name-calling, the more children disliked their peers. Gender and grade level were found to have a significant negative relationship. The name-calling experiences of students affected their friendship relationships negatively, which contributed to violence in schools. School counsellors must be aware of name-calling victims and perpetrators, as well as organizing educational programmes aimed at helping students to cope with these problems. © NAPCE 2004.