Students with Special Needs and Disabilities: Predicting the Psychosocial Development in a Modern Educational Environment

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of determining of the scientific criteria and factors for predicting the psychosocial development of students with special needs and disabilities in the modern educational environment. The features of the modern population of students with special needs and disabilities would need to be clarified in the context of the emergence of variable forms of education and the introduction of federal state educational standards for such students into Russian educational practice. Axiomatic ideas about typical manifestations of psychophysical developmental disorders in childhood, the criteria for its classification and differentiation would need to be revised on the basis of specially designed complex and prolonged clinical, psychological and educational studies. Authors emphasize the need of clarifying the features, causes and mechanisms of learning difficulties, adaptation and socialization of students with special needs and disabilities, which inevitably undergoing various transformations in a changing socio-cultural environment. According to the main methodological basis of this study — Cultural-Historical Approach, the leading role is given to social factors concentrated in the educational environment, which are currently the least studied. There are no studies based on the long-term monitoring of changes in the specific features in the process of education. Meanwhile, such data would make it possible to assess to the probable influence of social factors on the quality of education and psychosocial development of students with special needs and disabilities, and to clarify their role in changing the phenomenology of impaired development as well. Such data appears to be relevant for analyzing the ratio of the role of bio and social factors in the possible transformations of psychological dysontogenesis and can be seen as a basis for optimizing educational activities, and for increasing the accuracy and credibility of estimates as well. Longitudinal clinical-psychological-pedagogical research conducted in modern educational conditions is considered as a condition for solving the indicated challenges.