Tag "education"

Educational inequality is a universal problem, but it manifests itself in different countries in different ways. Comparing the issue across different contexts is always interesting—even more so if the person doing the comparing has a diverse set of examples to draw upon. Adam Gemar earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in the US before earning his Doctoral degree at Durham University (UK). Now he is a Postdoctoral Fellow at HSE University’s Institute of Education, where he is studying educational inequality in Russia with the Centre for Cultural Sociology. In his interview, he spoke about his research, life in Moscow, and Russian winters.

Four-year, instead of five-year, degree programmes shave off a year of study, thus saving considerable time and money, and allowing graduates to find employment and build work experience earlier, which eventually translates into a higher salary. This raises the question of whether a fifth year of undergraduate studies brings any returns at all.

In 2012, many universities started signing incentive contracts with their staff in order to stimulate research and active inclusion in the global academic market. Together with orders issued by Russia’s president in May, this has led to growth in university salaries. But exactly which responsibilities increase pay — teaching, research or administrative work? The answer to this question will help improve the effective contract system to make it profitable both for teachers and universities.

Most international students in Russia come from CIS countries, or former Soviet republics in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe. The preserved social and cultural links promote this, as well as students’ good command of Russian. Students from outside the former Soviet Union come to Russia primarily due to economic reasons and the strong reputation of Russia’s leading universities. At the same time, however, they often see Russia as an unsafe country and consider it a backup plan.

2020 has definitely become a year of online learning. Children of all ages, as well as many adults, have had to study remotely. This has allowed researchers to look at education accessibility problems from a new perspective and evaluate how the massive transition to online learning aligns with existing norms and attitudes toward limiting screen time. Nadezhda Knyaginina and Evgenii Puchkov, researchers from the Education Law Laboratory at the HSE Institute of Education talked about their lab’s research on this matter.

Right now university students are taking their fall semester final exams. For various reasons, some students drop out. This is especially the case in advanced fields of study such as engineering. Researchers from HSE University’s Institute of Education Evgenia Shmeleva and Isak Froumin have published a paper on the decisive factors that cause students to abandon their university education. 

End-of-term exams have just finished in many universities operating on the modular system. Some students passed because they worked hard while others passed by cheating. Why do some students cheat by looking over someone's shoulder, furtively searching for test answers on the internet, using cheat sheets during exams or paying others to complete their coursework? A study conducted by the HSE Centre for Sociology of Higher Education offers some answers.

While 9th-graders and 11th-graders are busy respectively preparing for the Basic State Exam (BSE) and Unified State Exam (U.S.E.), their parents are the ones who lay the groundwork for their success. However, if parental assistance turns into pressure, it can produce the opposite effect on young people, HSE University researchers note. Here, we look at how parents can help their children do well on the Unified State Exam.

The new model, created by computational social scientist Ivan Smirnov of HSE University, predicts the academic success of Russian high school students with an accuracy of 94%. The model generates its predictions based on users’ distinctive vocabulary and speech patterns, and the predictions have strongly correlated with students’ Unified State Exam (USE) scores.

The ‘digital age’ of education did not just dawn — it burst upon us like a tsunami. Long-term, systematic strategies for the transition to online learning have been swept away by global problems, and primarily the COVID-19 pandemic and measures for stopping it. In this Op-Ed, Institute of Education research fellow and Russian post-doc recruiter Daria Shcheglova tells IQ.HSE how some students might have been overlooked in the feverish rush to digitalize education.