IOE to Partner with Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University

This July, a Memorandum of Cooperation was signed between IOE and Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University (KazNPU). In accordance with the agreement, the parties will jointly embark on a multifaceted, high-scope agenda in R&D areas central to IOE’s academic profile.   

“Our Kazakhstani partners have expressed keen interest in what IOE has focused on in such areas as educational monitoring and testing as well as action plans for supporting underperforming schools. We believe that ploughing our joint efforts in further advancing R&D in these domains will enable us to achieve a more speedy and comprehensive progress. Evidence from Kazakhstani education is of interest to IOE specifically insofar as school digitization is concerned. The Kazakhstani context provides good grounds for a comparative study in circumstances where this country has over the years developed much of its own distinctive educational system while also sharing some transformation models with Russia and retaining certain traces of the common Soviet past,” Head of IOE, Dr. Isak Froumin has commented.         

According to Dr. Froumin, joining R&D efforts in the field of educational monitoring and testing will allow introducing new tools for measuring schooler metasubject and socio-emotional skills in Kazakhstan. “While a sound framework for benchmarking the progress in individual disciplinary competencies is already in place in Kazakhstan, there have yet to be implemented robust instruments for assessing student entry ability and how a child’s personality develops over the years in schooling. Designed by IOE, such instruments have already been successfully validated in Russia and, in our opinion, they can be well adapted to the Kazakhstani context. So, our KazNPU partners will play the central part in this tailoring process where the R&D component will involve exploring various perspectives about what specific elements of Kazakhstani schooling should be factored in. Joint R&D will be structured through a series of academic visits, online discussions, seminars, internships, etc. We expect this cooperation to ultimately benefit either of the parties,” Isak Froumin has added.            

In broader terms, the IOE–KazNPU partnership framework will also contribute to further study of transformative processes that have been shaping educational systems in the former Soviet states – one of IOE’s principal research areas in recent years. Earlier this July, a volume titled, 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity, was released in the Palgrave Studies in Global Higher Education series, a deliverable of the first-ever study of its kind that was spearheaded by the IOE University Development Lab and brought together over 40 education scholars from across the globe.