Yana O. Oparina

The requirements of modern education issue serious challenges to both teachers and students in terms of the quality of education, the development of each child, and working out an individual approach to achieve success. However, not all students can meet such high requirements for mastering all subjects of the school curriculum, their academic performance decreases as they grow up. The problem is especially acute for secondary school, when students need to make an informed choice of their own educational route, choose a profession. There is often a situation when a student evades independent choice, prefers to cheat off tasks, in fact, demonstrating educational deviation. In this regard, the issue of the formation of positive educational motivation remains one of the urgent problems in modern pedagogy. The article presents the intermediate results of experimental work within the framework of a dissertation research on the peculiarities of the application the tasks aimed at developing soft skills in the educational process. The problem of academic failure as one of the signs of educational failure is actualized. The author reviews existing works of domestic and foreign scientists on this issue. The aim is to characterize the ways of forming positive educational motivation in academically unsuccessful schoolchildren with the help of educational tasks aimed at the development of flexible skills. Learning tasks for grades 8-9 aimed at developing flexible skills have been worked out for the experiment in such academic subjects as algebra, geometry, Russian, physics, history and social studies (10 tasks for each group of subjects). The experiment involves a team of teachers in these subjects (four people) in the 2022/2023 academic year. Methods of observation, interviews with teachers working in experimental classes are used. Individual work sheets were worked out and used with a plan to eliminate gaps in knowledge (with tasks aimed at developing flexible skills) in the framework of additional individual work with students who received the "unsatisfactory" mark at the end of the academic quarter. Experimental group of failing students: two students of the 8th grade, eight students of the 9th grade. The presented research results allow us to conclude about the peculiarities of the influence of tasks aimed at the development of flexible skills: increased interest in the subject, slight influence on academic performance. The data obtained can be used in the work of secondary and high school teachers, as well as for further pedagogical research.