News

Harry Patrinos, Practice Manager for Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank Education, was visiting IOE this spring to lecture on what tops the international agenda in the economics of education and education policy. In between his talks, we asked the IOE faculty and students who attended for their firsthand impressions of this mini-course.

Sticky Floor, Glass Ceiling and Other Problems

This spring notches another important milestone for the Institute’s partnership & networking agenda as a Memorandum of Cooperation has recently been signed between IOE and the Department of Education at Peking University.

The round table on ‘Psychological Wellbeing in the Digital Age’ brought together a range of scholars and one industry professional to talk about how a user’s digital footprint—or ‘digital traces’—can be used to discern a person’s psychological state, predict their behavior, and, potentially, even improve their psychological wellbeing.

The role of regional and specialized institutions of higher education in achieving national development goals must increase, and leading universities will help them. This was the conclusion reached by participants of the plenary session on Russian higher education that took place as part of the XX April International Academic Conference.

Dr. Dorothy Espelage (University of Florida) presented a comprehensive account of her research into youth bullying spanning more than two decades in an invited paper ‘Prevention & Intervention of Youth Bullying and other Forms of Youth Aggression: Research Informed Strategies’ at the XX April International Academic Conference.

In their commentary featured in International Higher Education, Philip G. Altbach and Hans de Wit of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College (USA), IOE’s long-standing partner for a vast academic agenda, reflect on the main reasons behind the growing spate of redundant research publications and what needs to be done to rectify the trend.

In late March, IOE hosted a closing session for a series of expert seminars on psychometric research and training that were held as part of the Russia Education Aid for Development (READ) program, a joint initiative between the Russian government and the World Bank. The forum brought together a cohort of strategists, institutional leaders, researchers and representatives of other stakeholders from India, Mongolia, Nepal, Vietnam, Armenia, and Tajikistan.

An international research team involving IOE has reported findings from a large-scale project that benchmarks the learning outcomes among senior students of Computer Science (CS) at U.S., Indian, Chinese and Russian universities. Based on a unique testing methodology developed by ETS, the study finds that U.S. undergraduates have substantially stronger ability across dimensions of the CS curriculum than their peers from India, China and Russia. The paper has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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.