Institute of Education

This pocket data book contains the main indicators describing the development trends of general, secondary vocational, higher education, vocational training, and additional education in the Russian Federation. The publication also covers key education indicators for the OECD countries. The data book includes information of the Federal State Statistics Service, Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, Federal Treasury, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as results of methodological and analytical studies of the HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge.

Along with numerical indicators, student evaluations of teaching (SET) can be expressed in the form of comments. Open questions provide deeper, value-based, and reflective descriptions of teaching with a free response about the positive and negative sides of students’ experience of study. This feedback can be collected using paper-based or web-based questionnaires. In-class, paper-based evaluations usually demonstrate higher response rates, but online tools create an environment allows wider, more reflective, and more emotional comments. Raw qualitative data such as comments need additional coding and interpretation to provide useful data for decision making as students consider good and bad teaching in different ways. In this short paper we discuss anonymously collected online comments written by students at HSE University (Moscow) and their practical meaning for university governance in teaching.

The phenomenon of private tutoring has become widespread worldwide along with the formal education system since the beginning of the 21st century. Many families invest in supplementary education for their children in the hope of securing a promising future for them. However, it is difficult to say unequivocally whether tutoring is effective - this topic is the most controversial in this research area, since the studies have shown controversial results. What all these studies have in common is that they focus on the presence or absence of a quantitative effect on students' test scores and often do not take into account factors such as the portrait and qualifications of the tutor. This is a major oversight as the services provided by private tutors can differentiate greatly. Due to the unclear legal status of tutors in Russia, we cannot always determine the quality of the services they provide.

This study is aimed at assessing the quality of tutoring services and determining how existing tutors meet expectations and whether they help their students to achieve educational results. An analysis of the profiles of 13260 tutors in main school subjects from Moscow, Russia was conducted. One of the largest websites for providing tutoring services (www.repetitors.info) was used as a data source. The main focus was on the analysis of tutors' personal and professional characteristics as well as on the text analysis of the testimonials that parents or students leave after working with the tutor.

The results show that the majority of customers are highly satisfied with the quality of the services provided (average tutor rating is 4.76 out of 5) and are willing to pay for it. As for the text analysis of testimonials, the findings show that the most frequent characteristics of a tutor were associated with a positive impression of cooperation, a description of the tutor's professionalism, high intellectual abilities of a specialist, as well as compliance with established agreements.

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed daily life across the world and affected multiple social institutions. It may also have modified parents’ gendered division of labour. Current research on family functioning during the pandemic has provided mixed evidence on the influence of at-home work and at-home schooling on mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in childcare, child’s education and housework. In this paper, we use data from 1359 Russian mothers to study whether fathers' participation in these activities was influenced by the increased need for parental help in schooling and more opportunities for help due to remote work during the lockdown. We find that fathers’ involvement was higher if they worked remotely during the lockdown and if the child needed much additional help with schooling after school closures. These results hold true even after controlling for fathers’ pre-pandemic involvement. In line with conditional fatherhood theory, mothers’ engagement with remote schooling was almost unrelated to their employment status and work arrangement. Overall, our evidence supports the ‘needs exposure’ hypothesis that additional family needs in combination with switching to remote work can increase fathers’ involvement. However, evaluating the duration of these changes and their long-term influence on families’ functioning would require further research.