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Adaskina A.A., Al–khargan K.I. Art education for elementary school students in Iraq and Russia. Pedagogical Review. 2025. Issue 1 (59). P. 25-35

Art education is currently one of the compulsory areas of primary education in most countries of the world. This article examines the influence of cultural traditions on the art education of schoolchildren in Iraq and Russia. The purpose of this article is to identify how cultural traditions influence the content and methods of primary art education. The art education system in Russia is based on European and national traditions, trying to introduce children to the culture and art of different countries, not only Russia, while art education in Iraq is largely subordinated to the task of preserving cultural traditions. Teaching artistic disciplines in Russia is based on deep theoretical developments in the field of psychology and pedagogy. Currently, Russia has adopted a unified program for fine arts. Iraq does not have a unified curriculum for teaching fine arts. Teachers can work according to recommended programs or offer their own. The art education curriculum in Russia is secular in nature. In Iraq, trends in secular and religious education have long been competing. The influence of Islam on the teaching of fine arts can be seen in many schools, where preference is given to traditional forms of art, such as ornaments and calligraphy.

Keywords: primary art education, cultural traditions of Russia and Iraq, primary art education programs, art education deficits

Adaskina A.A., Zaretskaya A.A. The "Dramatizing fables" method as an instrument for comprehensive diagnostics of psychological specifics of dramatic text perception by school students. Pedagogical Review. 2026. Issue 4 (68). P. 159-169

The article addresses a pressing issue in educational psychology – the diagnosis of school students’ reading development. The research is grounded in the tenets of cultural-historical psychology, which views understanding as a complex, mediated activity of the individual. A literary genre, as a historically developed construct, is interpreted as a specific cultural tool (L.S. Vygotsky) that organizes the reader’s perception and guides their interpretative activity along a trajectory intended by the author. The most challenging genre for perception is drama. The formal and substantive features of dramatic texts cause difficulties for students, preventing them from comprehending a literary work at a conceptual level. The lack of developed generalized ways of acting (V.V. Davydov) related to decoding dramatic works hinders students’ ability to overcome naïve-realistic perception and reconstruct the author’s position through a comprehensive analysis of the elements of form and content. As a solution to this problem, the article proposes the “Dramatizing Fables” method. A high level of reading development is associated with the ability for creative transformation of the source text. Therefore, this method assesses the formation of the reader’s generalized ways of acting necessary for understanding drama through a quasiauthorial task that objectifies the process of understanding in the final product of the subjects’ activity. The article presents data confirming the validity and reliability of the proposed diagnostic tool. The value of the method lies in its ability to identify deficits in students’ reading proficiency by analyzing their ways of interacting with the text, rather than testing factual knowledge.

Keywords: activity approach, teaching literature, understanding of a literary text, understanding dramatic text, drama, early adolescence, reading skills evaluation