IOE Ramps up R&D Partnership with Kazakhstan

The HSE Institute of Education and Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University have recently entered into a cooperation to advance research and development across an array of domains in education.

The Memorandum of Cooperation was signed by representatives of the academic leadership of IOE and Abai University earlier this year.

The parties have pledged to pursue a joint agenda as broad and multifaceted as: evaluating innovative policies and practices in education; future-proofing doctoral schooling; psychometric developments for primary learners; inequalities in higher education; bolstering digital roadmaps in higher education in the post-pandemic reality; etc. All of the projects within the scope of the partnership will be spearheaded under direct supervision of IOE experts.

Specifically, the newly launched cooperation envisages three projects that are essentially offshoots from the R&D scope that the ‘twin labs’ established at IOE and Abai University have been pursuing jointly since 2019. The agreement also assumes two more projects that the parties will embark on from scratch.

Diana Koroleva

Project Lead

A project headed by Diana Koroleva of the IOE Educational Innovations Lab focuses on identifying and evaluating the impact of innovative endeavors that take root across the strands of the EdTech sector, including public schools and private entrepreneurship. In delving into the landscape of bottom-up educational innovations in Kazakhstan, the project will essentially harness the analytical framework that has been designed by the Lab experts. 

Evgeniy Terentev

Project Lead

Evgeniy Terentev of the IOE Center for Sociology of Higher Education will take the helm of a joint project that will explore how doctoral hopefuls in Kazakhstan have been able to develop their research competences. Topics surrounding Kazakhstani doctoral education have come to resonate way more widely across academic and policy discourse on the back of a reformatory agenda that has been underway in the sector, much of which has been inspired by massive campaigning among doctoral students themselves. This testifies to the high relevance of this R&D endeavor whose groundwork will build on the huge empirical expertise that the IOE Center for Sociology of Higher Education has accumulated while researching into various facets of the academic and life experiences of doctoral students in Russia and internationally.   

Elena Kardanova

Project Lead

A project led by Elena Kardanova of the IOE Center for Psychometrics and Measurements in Education will continue the joint R&D in benchmarking the attainment in reading skills among primary schoolers. Based on the original assessment tool that has been designed for Russian learners, a similar testing solution will now be created to allow an accurate measurement of how Kazakhstani primary students develop their reading capacity. 

Sergey Malinovskiy

Project Lead

A project headed by Sergey Malinovskiy of the IOE Laboratory for University Development will focus on an all-round analysis of inequalities among university students with disabilities. Based on a massive survey of handicapped students at Kazakhstani universities, the joint research team will identify and come up with possible strategies to remedy the impact of key factors that hamper access to and success in higher education among this cohort of at-risk learners. 

Ivan Karlov

Project Lead

Ivan Karlov of the IOE Center for Digital Transformation in Education will take up the lead of a project that aims to formulate future-proof roadmaps for the digital development of Kazakhstani universities as the sector is now stepping into the new post-COVID reality. Inter alia, the project framework involves an analysis of empirical evidence about how well Abai University has been able to get into the swing of and steer in the pandemic environment.