IOE Launches English-taught Doctoral Track in Educational Measurement & Testing
The spring of 2018 heralds a momentous addition to IOE’s graduate curriculum, as a new English-taught PhD track in Educational Measurement & Testing has been launched at the IOE Doctoral Center for Education. The track is slated to welcome its first class in the fall of 2018. International students can apply for Russian government scholarships until March 31, 2018. General application round is from August 1 until September 14.
Backed by the World Bank's Russian Education Aid for Development (READ 2) initiative, the new PhD track is a much-awaited output of IOE’s long-standing and prolific cooperation with its key global partners. This offering is now one-of-a-kind in Russia as well as in the majority of European markets for doctoral training in education.
The curriculum core has been designed in association with Boston College Lynch School of Education, one the world’s top-tier centers in psychometrics and educational testing, which ensures the program is on par with today’s top-notch academic standards in the field. The track features an innovative syllabus that enables systemic and synergistic insights into what now makes up global best practice in measurements and testing. The conventional approach, where students are typically required to take a series of standalone course credits, has been replaced with four complementary modules: Research Methodology & Basic Statistics, Advanced Statistics, Test Development, and Advanced Psychometrics. This new curriculum framework is best placed to equip the track enrollees with the most profound and comprehensive understanding of what is involved in both research and applied aspects of modern psychometrics.
Advanced Studies in Psychometrics: Building a Career that Counts
While some might think educational measurement is a field that is rather limited in terms of its academic focus and career prospects, demand for training in educational psychometrics and related areas has been steadily on the rise in recent years.
The global race for capable and resourceful human capital has been unceasingly accelerating, which has placed more emphasis on education quality as well as the quality of tools that various stakeholders rely on in judging about the adequacy of academic progress, learning outcomes, individual knowledge profiles, and so on. As modern labor market requirements are gaining in diversity and increasingly involve such complex meta-disciplinary skills as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, etc., educational monitoring & testing comes to face new challenges consisting in how we can in fact best tackle the task of reliably measuring these seemingly ‘unmeasurable’ constructs, so as to facilitate more robust, evidence-supported pathways for the learning & development sector.
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IOE psychometric team interning at CITO, 2018
Global evaluation & benchmarking frameworks, such as PISA, TIMSS, iPIPS, etc., are expanding to span more participant nations as well as to involve more complex data and advanced assessment and interpretation methods. Taken altogether, these developments, driven by how the progressive socioeconomic change has been remolding expectations about the content of education and what sort of talent and labor incentives it should generate, have emphasized the role of appropriately skilled, up-to-date monitoring and testing professionals who can act as a ‘fair mouthpiece’ in reporting on the quality of learning and the capability of labor power. Present-day career opportunities in psychometrics stretch far beyond academia alone, since this expertise becomes crucial for a host of learning & development domains, including psychology, corporate recruitment and talent management functions, etc.
Faculty & students in IOE’s International Summer School on Applied Psychometrics, 2017
The track faculty is a superb cohort of accomplished scholars with frontline expertise spanning various areas of social science research and psychometrics. The course design provides enrollees with ample opportunities for receiving course-through academic guidance and feedback from both IOE experts and international guest instructors.
The program welcomes applications from candidates with a minimum of Specialist / Master’s degree in any relevant major, including Education & Teaching, Psychology, Social Sciences, Economics, Statistics, etc.
Enrollment in the track is competitive and in line with the General Terms & Conditions of the IOE Doctoral Center for Education. Admission decision-making will consider, inter alia, one’s previous experience in social science research and basic statistics (learn more about HSE International Doctoral Admissions 2018).
The IOE Graduate School of Education is recognized as Russia’s leading doctoral centre for training expert academics and practitioners. They are equipped with a diverse range of skills and the ability to drive meaningful transformations in various fields, both domestically and internationally.
Thanks to its highly innovative and engaging graduate curricula, developed with the help of Russian and international education professionals, IOE offers doctoral students diverse opportunities to build their skill set and affords insights into cutting-edge research and practical activities. Academic internships with IOE’s world-renowned partner centres, including Stanford University, the University of Oslo, University College London and the Singapore National Institute of Education, are a major part of this unique doctoral offering.
2018 International Summer School on Applied Psychometrics: Admissions Close on April 30, 2018.