Post-Docs Research at the Institute of Education

Tatjana Kanonire received her PhD in Psychology from University of Latvia in Psychology. She joined HSE two years ago.  First, she spent a year at the International Research and Teaching Laboratory for Socio-Cultural Research.  Since October 2015 she has been working at the Centre for Education Quality Monitoring of the Institute of Education.  Tatjana has talked to The HSE Look about her research interests and teaching activities at HSE.

Research

Two major research topics of the Laboratory were acculturation and values. I worked on both, and I keep doing research on acculturation — it’s particularly interesting for me because the data was collected in Latvia, where I am from. I stay in contact with the laboratory, but switched my major research focus to the Quality of Education and am very excited about my transfer to the Institute of Education. I particularly like that all projects have a wide scale and are very complex.

One of the current projects is aimed at monitoring the quality of higher education in cross-country comparison (multiple universities in USA, China and Russia): we examine the results of students in STEM. We put a lot of attention on research design and methodology and analyzing the data not only from Russia but also from China.

Another research project is focused on primary school. We adapted and standardized the International Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (iPIPS) — the test to evaluate skills of children at the start of the school and their progress during the first year in reading, language, and math. This test also helps to predict their results at the end of the year and to evaluate the progress. Two large regions of Russia are participating in this project in 2015 — that’s over 12,000 first graders. The benefits are two-fold: teachers and parents get feedback about their students, and researchers collect a vast database for further study. The region as a whole can assess and review its educational policy.

The project I am working on is about renewing the work on the original Russian test of students’ achievements; the theoretical framework of the toolkit relies upon the concept of teaching/learning process based on Lev Vygotsky’s ideas.  A couple of years ago the test were developed for the 4th grade, in mathematics and Russian language. We hope to expand the test, and to cover more grades and subjects. I’m participating in development of theoretical frame of the research on predictors of achievement in primary school; and based on it prepare the questionnaires which give us insight into the context which influences the performance at schools.

Such studies are interesting for the educational institutions, of course, but also for the researchers: they provide a chance to develop the instruments of measuring education quality and fine-tune them, as well as rich data for analysis of the assessment results.

Teaching

I am also involved into the Master’s Programme 'Educational and Psychological Measurement': our students are very motivated, they participate a lot in the research carried out within the Institute of Education – one of the groups recently returned from a 'field trip' during which they were collecting data and supervised the procedure. I think that this programme has a lot of potential for attracting students: it offers very up-to-date methodology, courses of a very good quality, and interaction with the leading specialists who are often invited for lectures and research events.  There are no similar educational products in Russian regions which can rival it. It can be very interesting for students from abroad as well.  

For further information please visit ifaculty.hse.ru