Institute of Education

Different parental strategies in education are bound to produce various effects: not all of these strategies are equally productive in their application. At the same time, the impact of parental involvement in general education on their children's extracurricular activities has not been thoroughly studied. This article attempts to fill this gap by analyzing the relationship between strategies of parental involvement in education and adolescents' participation in extracurricular activities. The data source for this study were parents whose children attend general education institutions (N = 3,887; Mage of children = 12.4, SD = 3.1; 55.6% female). A latent class analysis identified three categories of parental participation in education: “Intrusive”, “Supervisory”, and “Detached”. Each category showed different patterns of involvement from primary to high school, distinguished by the type of extracurricular participation encouraged by parents. In primary school, children of “Intrusive” parents attended the highest number of extracurricular activities. In secondary school, they attended fewer activities compared to the children of “Supervisory” parents. Children of “Supervisory” parents often chose to participate in activities on their own, and continued to attend the selected activity, or change activity on their own initiative. The children of “Detached” parents were less involved in extracurricular activities in primary school. In some cases, they chose their own extracurricular activities as they grew older. The study demonstrates that parental involvement is related to adolescents’ participation in extracurricular activities. Parents’ strategies should be considered instrumental as they produce a variety of different outcomes, depending upon the adolescents’ age and type of activities. The identified strategies may serve as a basis for recommendations for development of parental competencies, consultations, and family education.

Graduate education was established in Russia in the early 19th century with a dual system of lower and higher doctorates. This was suspended after the revolution in 1917, but then restored in the early 1930s. Since then, there have been two major waves of expansion, but since 2011, the number of doctoral scholars has been in decline.

Traditionally, supervision in Russia has been based upon the ‘master–apprentice’ model, which leaves students heavily reliant on a single supervisor and upon the latter’s engagement with their research. Despite recent initiatives to implement structured programs, this model has survived to the present day.

One reason for this has been that supervision may not be a priority for institutions in Russia in the face of responding to such systemic challenges as lack of funding, excessive state control, and falling enrollments of doctoral scholars.

This chapter highlights these key aspects of doctoral supervision in Russia. It outlines the challenges and limitations of the dyadic model of supervision and draws attention to the needs variously to diversify the system of incentives and rewards for supervisors, to provide them with initial and continuing professional development programs, and to introduce the model of team supervision.

This paper explores the black box behind efficiency measurements in higher education and define the determinants of university efficiency. Particularly, it investigates how the efficiency of universities is affected by the characteristics of the territory in which they operate. We propose an analysis that combines two perspectives: 1) the resource dependence theory, suggesting that the location of university can determine the amount of resources available to it; 2) institutional isomorphism, according to which the characteristics of other higher education institutions located in the same area may shape the university production function and the efficiency of its operations. In order to test this framework we use the data on Russian universities and non-parametric conditional order-m efficiency estimator with two categories of exogenous variables. The first group includes the social, economic and cultural characteristics of the region where the university is located. The second set includes the characteristics of other higher education institutions located in the same region. Our findings highlight that the managerial efficiency of universities is strongly associated with the characteristics of the environment in which they operate