The detection of the level of school students’ reconstructive imagination is one of the unsolved problems of modern education.

The aim of the research was to figure out criteria of estimation of reconstructive imagination on the basis of “Turn On Your Imagination” methodological technique. The subjects of the experiment were offered to envisage the images appearing while reading/listening to a text and then give their verbal description. As stimulating material we used texts that contained images of different modalities and potentially unfamiliar (obsolete, poetic etc.) words. The novelty of this method is that it suggests studying reconstructive imagination in connection with text comprehension, therefore the estimation procedure can be used to diagnose both mental processes.

The sample included 145 people (I stage of the research; students at the age of 10, 12, 14, 16), because one of the research tasks was to reveal dependence of the reconstructive imagination level on the age.

The analysis of the acquired material let us formulate the following criteria of the imagination estimation (for descriptive texts): 1) accordance with the original text / no fictitious images (fantasies), 2) understanding / misunderstanding of the key images, 3) fullness / reduction of the picture that is to reconstruct, 4) figurativeness / non-figurativeness of the description. For each criterion there was a scale to estimate the intensity of the feature (0-2 points), but if the subject got 0 points by the first and the second criteria, the final mark was 0, too.

It is found out that in each age group high level of reconstructive imagination is demonstrated by no more than 10% of the subjects (very high level is registered in no more than 3-4% of cases), low level is demonstrated by 40%–70% of the subjects (depending on the difficulty of the text).

The perspective of further research is associated with creation of a system of training tasks aimed at the reconstructive imagination development.