Projects 2012

The head of the project: M.Karnoy, I.D. Frumin

1. Analysis of influence of the school and teacher characteristics upon the school students’ achievements in the international comparative researches. The identification of reasons for disruption in TIMSS and PISA results.

a) The research objectives

- To investigate contribution of teachers’ characteristics and duration of schooling into students’ scores in TIMSS and PISA; 

- To identify reasons of divergent students’ scores in the two tests - TIMSS and PISA in terms of skills assessed by these tests.

b) The research tasks in the year 2012 

As for the line of research concerning  teachers’ characteristics and duration of schooling in students’ scores in TIMSS and PISA:

- to evaluate difference in a student’s score in the tasks of TIMSS-math and TIMSS-physics (biology) as being connected with different characteristics of teachers of math and physics (biology); to identify  a teacher’s characteristics contributing to a student’s score;

- to consider the above-mentioned difference as dependent on a student’s sensitivity to the pedagogical impact, which lies on a lot of factors, including the character of motivation and a child’s abilities as well as on the school policy; to define in what connection and under what conditions of a student’s variables  the effect of a teacher’s characteristics will be larger;

- to find out the national specifics of the results obtained after conducting the analogous research on data of the Eastern Europe and Scandinavian countries;

- to estimate the effect of the additional year of schooling on the score growth in PISA; to determine changes in efficiency of the school education in Russia for 10 years; to contrast these indicators with analogous ones in the countries which showed considerable growth in  PISA score (Latvia, Poland).

As for the line of research concerning reasons of divergent students’ scores in the two tests - TIMSS and PISA in terms of skills assessed by these tests:

- to find out latent task structure for math in TIMSS and PISA; to identify the peculiarities of tasks  making them more difficult/easier for the Russian school students;

- to give the expert interpretation of the detected factors in terms of the academic programme (experts are attracted);

- to compare success rate in solving the tasks of PISA and TIMSS on the same sampling of pupils and students; to define peculiarities of functioning the tasks towards each other (PISA-TIMSS) and towards the educational stage of respondents  (school pupils – students).

2. The USE as a predictor of successful training. The assessment of predicting force of results in different subjects. 

a) The research objective - to evaluate and compare the predicting force of different USE subjects, those which are included into the composite score, taken into account while entering the higher educational establishment, as well as those which are excluded from the composite score  but passed by a student.

b) The research tasks in the year 2012 

- to collect the most complete data about students’ academic progress and the USE results in higher educational establishments.

- to estimate the predicting force of the USE score separately for every exam passed. 

-to compare different specialties and direction of training in the higher educational establishments under consideration.

3. The assessment of connection of context characteristics of school leavers, the Final State Exam (FSE) and USE scores with the further life trajectories of the students.

a) The research objective - to estimate relations between teachers' characteristics and teaching practices with the results of USE.

b) The research tasks in the year 2012: 

- to estimate the general contribution of teacher and class characteristics to the educational achievements of students (which are measured by USE);
- to estimate the effect of the obtained education features, professional experience and teacher's cultural capital on the educational achievements of students;
- to estimate relations between the educational achievements of students and "teacher's occupation", practices of the use of different forms of activites and different types of educational tasks;
- to define for which groups of students professional characterisitcs and teachers' practices have greater effect on educational achievements.