Centre for Psychometrics and Measurements in Education
Set up in 2012, the Centre for Psychometrics and Measurements in Education is engaged in multifaceted research, applied developments, advisory and professional networking in educational monitoring and psychometrics.
Partnering with leading foreign research hubs and acclaimed experts in the above field, the Centre pursues a diverse academic and advisory agenda in evaluating the performance of learners and instructors across educational settings and at various levels, including under internationally recognized frameworks such as PISA and iPIPS.
The Centre is involved in delivering IOE’s Measurement in Psychology and Education Master’s programme and Educational Measurement and Testing PhD programme.
Since 2014, the Centre has run the annual International Summer School on Applied Psychometrics. Every year, the School offers an engaging and focused programme of learning and networking that is framed along several specialist strands, so that junior-career attendees of varied backgrounds and level of preparation can make the most of the theoretical syllabus alongside hands-on exposures to test design. The School tracks are delivered by international faculty representing the world’s leading R&D centers and think-tanks in psychometrics.
The Centre’s expertise spans the following key areas:
- Educational assessment: developing skill and academic progress testing tools; analyzing and assessing existing measurement approaches and instruments; adaptive testing; computerized testing; processing and interpreting test results
- Conducting multi-faceted research in the area of education assessment, including as part of collaborative international endeavours
- Advising various institutional stakeholders on educational assessment and monitoring issues.
Key Credentials
Predicators of Achievements at Primary School Entry and Completion. This project is aimed at assessing the role of individual and environmental factors in determining children’s entry ability, learning progress and achievement in primary school. In particular, the project seeks to study:
- Relationships between family socioeconomic status, parental motivation, non-financial investments into child’s education, and child’s skills at the beginning of schooling
- Factors that facilitate the development of study skills during the first year at school
- Relationships between non-cognitive development of child at the beginning of schooling (personal, social and emotional development, and behavioral characteristics) and learning success
- Individual and context factors that explain learning outcomes at the end of primary school (in the fourth year of schooling)
- Models that explain levels of knowledge and skill attainment at primary school entry and completion.
The project is based on iPIPS instruments developed by the Centre in collaboration with Durham University (UK) in 2013–2014.
SUPER project (Study of Undergraduate Performance). SUPER is a large-scale, data-intensive international study aiming to benchmark academic achievement of engineering students in Russia, China, and the USA. The research framework enables deeper and more compelling insights into individual and institutional factors influencing the quality of engineering education in the said countries. In particular, the project endeavours to:
- Analyze first- and third-graders’ achievement in basic disciplines (mathematics, physics, IT), as well as advances in critical thinking ability and numerical literacy
- Compare educational achievements on a cross-country basis
- Study multi-faceted factors that influence engineering education
- Study the frequency and reasons for academic fraud (such as plagiarism)
- Study students’ attitudes towards academic fraud.
Currently, two phases of the project have been accomplished covering 4,500 Russian students from 34 higher education institutions. More than 500 professors in physics and mathematics have completed questionnaires, and their teaching practices are now being analyzed in relation to students’ achievements.
21st Century Skills: Identification & Evaluation Tools. This high-profile project seeks to develop evidence-based, workable, and scalable tools and approaches for identifying and assessing students’ metacognitive abilities. The so-called ‘soft skills’ are now recognized as a top-priority and highly challenging, complex research domain for the global academic community, the labor market, and many other stakeholders involved. Among such metacognitive skills, four are of particular interest for the Center: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity (the 4 Cs). The project’s main imperative is to equip schools with a convenient computerized tool to reliably and representatively measure students’ 4C abilities at primary school completion. Based on the assessment results obtained, practical recommendations for instructors will be developed as to ways to better accommodate the needs of the 21st century skills agenda in their teaching method and practice.
Education for Social Progress (ESP, a longitudinal study of progress in social and emotional skills at school). Implemented with the backing of Sberbank’s Investment in Future foundation, the Project aims to identify particular socio-emotional skills and other personality features that determine the general wellbeing and career success of an individual, and to evaluate how students develop these capacities in school. As the life and workplace of the 21st century have increasingly emphasized the role of upper-tier universal skills and competencies beyond any specific disciplinary realm, the Project seeks to yield conclusive evidence on which to devise more robust action plans for enhancing how both family and school can contribute to the nurturing of such human capacities. ESP is part of a broader international framework by OECD, Study of Social and Emotional Skills (SSES), which has been underway since 2017 and spans Russia, Canada, Italy, South Korea, etc.
Contacts
Academic Supervisor, email: ktarasova@hse.ru