Fridman’s Theory of Assignments

This reviewing article brings an analysis of Fridman’s attempt to elaborate a theory of assignments on the borders of psychology, logic, cybernetics, and pedagogy. L. M. Fridman sees the assignment as a real object independent of an active subject He has singled out the basic parameters of each assigtunent (the structure of the assignment, its logical correctness, degree of definiteness, measure of generalization, measure of completeness, formulation of the assignment in terms of language) und has defined them precisely. Fridman has developed three formal languages for the description and analysis of the assignment (the language of object bloc diagrams, the language of multigraphs, and the language of predicative logic). He has studied the natural language of assigimients and has given much attention to the classification of assigimients and to a precise delimitation of various types of assignments. The actual process of solving assignments is seen by L. M. Fridman as the interaction of an acting subject with an object — the assigiunent But he studies the activity of the subject in solving the assignment as an ideal, model activity and tries to construct a normative solution of assigiunents of a certain type.
Fridman’s approach — all things considered — abstracts from the most important pedagogical function, the formative function. This theory of assignments does not take into accoimt, for the time being, the psychological differences in man as solver of the assignment It ignores age and individual differences (appropriateness of the assigiunent, its intelligibility), attitudes and interests (to what extent the assigimient is attractive, interesting, unusud, practical), performance motivation and Intelectual abilities (difficulty of the assignment) etc.