Tag "school education"

The pros and cons surrounding the migration of schools to remote learning amid policies to tame COVID-19 have been a site of starkly polarized debate since the very inception of the pandemic back to the spring of 2020. Stakeholders in general education – students, teachers, families, and institutional leaders – have all voiced their own and widely varying concerns about how K–11 schooling has been unfolding in the digital realm. These include fears over how well the learning process is being administered overall, a lack of adequate infrastructure and resources, disparities in how comfortable teachers and students have felt adapting to novel instructional and learning models as well as how they have been able to handle a surge in workloads, and growing unease over the quality of educational outcomes. Now that we are almost a year on since the COVID emergency took hold, IOE experts have set out to take stock of the lessons that we have learned so far from doing remote schooling in crisis times.

As the COVID curve has been tapering in many corners of the world, education leaders are pondering what the best strategies to reopen schools should look like.

As mobile computing and digital networking have witnessed a spectacular upswing in recent years, cyberbullying has become a pervasive occurrence that afflicts adolescents across dimensions of the modern digital realm. While continual exposures to various forms of harsh treatment online can inflict serious harm to the socio-emotional wellbeing of young people, adults around are mostly unaware of what is happening to the youngsters and often fail to come up with a timely and appropriate remedy. Eventually, as teens grow older, many of them seem to gradually come to terms with cyberbullying. A group of psychologists including IOE expert Alexandra Bochaver have studied what has underpinned the spread of harassment in the digital space and how students themselves perceive it.

Experts at IOE and Yandex have reported findings from a one-of-a-kind massive joint study that they carried out in association with Stanford and the University of California to evaluate whether and how engaging in practices of e-learning contributes to academic performance in primary school. Completing more assignments online can be specifically of aid in catching up those early-graders who fall behind on math literacy, the study suggests.

How to Prevent Underachievement at School

At a seminar held at HSE as part of the Days of the International Academy of Education in Moscow, Professor Gustavo E. Fischman (University of Arizona) likened international comparative studies of education quality to horse racing and discussed how these studies do not have as significant an impact on educational policy as is commonly believed.

A recent study by IOE experts Alina Ivanova, Diana Kaiky and Yulia Kuzmina finds a link between the phonological ability of school starters (e.g., sensitivity to the sound composition of speech, the ability to identify individual sounds and syllables, etc.) and their capacity in math. The socio-economic status of the child’s family turns out to be an important modulator in the phonology–math relationship, the study suggests.

A family’s involvement in a child’s education acts as a source of social mobility, according to a study by Mikhail Goshin and Tatyana Mertsalova, experts at the IOE Centre for Socio-economic Aspects of Schooling. Lower income parents who actively participate in their children’s school life open up more opportunities for their children.

During the 2018 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum held last week, a Memorandum of Cooperation was signed between HSE, the Moscow State University of Civil Engineering (MGSU), and Prosveshcheniye Education Holding. As part of the agreement, the two national research universities and Russia’s largest vendor of teaching and learning aids will jointly develop best-practice design and infrastructural solutions for school premises.

On April 14, 2017, Andreas Schleicher, Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills at OECD, spoke at the XVIII April Conference at Higher School of Economics (HSE). In 1999, he invented the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), one of the biggest international comparative studies of education quality. His honorary lecture was dedicated to global trends in the transformation of national education systems.