Achieving a state of flow in educational activities by university students as a development factor of sustainable behaviour

¹ Don State Technical University, Gagarina Sq., 1, 344000 Rostov-on-Don, Russia
² Southern Federal University, Bolshaya Sadovaya Str., 105/42, 344006 Rostov-on-Don, Rostov-on-Don, Russia

^* Corresponding author: heimag@yandex.ru

Abstract

Modern universities face an acute problem of ensuring students’ involvement in the learning process and their motivation for learning activities. One of the solutions may be to create conditions for the emergence of a state of “flow”, the concept of which was developed by M. Csikszentmihalyi. The study involved 109 students (98 women and 11 men) of bachelor’s and master’s degrees of the Faculty of Psychology of the Southern Federal University. A special questionnaire based on M. Csikszentmihalyi’s theory was designed to determine the expression of the components of the “flow” state in the respondents’ learning activities. The results show that many students feel a balance between the content of the lecture and their ability to understand its content, many students feel inner satisfaction after attending seminars. The obtained data correlate with the data of researchers on this topic, who noted the connection of flow states with motivations, meanings, predisposition to achievement and self-regulation.