News

A group of researchers representing four countries summed up the results of the Supertest, a large-scale study of the academic performance of engineering students in Russia, China, India, and the United States. It is the first study to track the progress of students in computer science and electrical engineering over the course of their studies with regard to their abilities in physics, mathematics, and critical thinking and compare the results among four countries. The article about study was published in Nature Human Behavior.

Specialists at the HSE Institute of Education found that the willingness of children to work independently at home during distance learning depended not only on the availability of appropriate technical means in the family (its socio-economic profile), but also on the nature of their parents’ work (a socio-psychological factor).

How does academic dishonesty of students correlate with honesty in further work? A group of scientists, including Evgenia Shmeleva, Research Fellow at the HSE Institute of Education, conducted research answering this question. During an open online seminar of a research group dedicated to ‘Academic Ethics in the Educational Context,’ Evgenia Shmeleva presented ‘Does Academic Dishonesty Seep into the Workplace? Evidence from a Longitudinal Study,’ which was prepared jointly with Igor Chirikov (University of California at Berkeley-HSE University) and Prashant Loyalka (Stanford University-HSE University)

We are still recruiting to multiple positions of International Postdoc Fellow open with IOE’s units across domains of educational and social R&D. You are welcome to apply until February 14, 2021. 

The HSE Institute of Education has opened a Joint Department with Skyeng to create faster and more effective tools in online education, research, and specialist training in the field of educational technology.

The latest issue of ‘Higher Education in Russia & Beyond,’ an international journal published quarterly by HSE and the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College (USA), IOE’s long-standing partner for a diverse research agenda, looks at how doctoral education has been evolving in different nations and over various timeframes. A brief by IOE experts Saule Bekova and Ivan Smirnov gives a glimpse of key factors that have been reshaping the sentiment towards doctoral studies in Russia. In his contribution, Evgeny Terentev of the IOE Center for Sociology of Higher Education discusses the main sources of academic support to PhD candidates at Russian universities.

IOE experts Evgeniia Shmeleva and Isak Froumin have recently come up with a paper that analyzes factors that are primarily responsible for undergraduate churn in programs of computer science and engineering education. The research draws upon a massive sample of more than 4,000 STEM students at 34 universities across Russia. Using this study as the starting point, we have set out to further elaborate on the topic, with student attrition representing an ever-pressing challenge for the global university realm. It turns out there is a particularly strong link between the amount of academic capital one was able to build up by school completion (as expressed by the score on the K–11 Unified State Exam) and one’s odds of successfully making it through the university coursework.

In December 2020, IOE expert Ulyana Zakharova took part in the eSTARS international conference of e-learning stakeholders, a joint initiative between HSE and Coursera, where she presented at a special session on sociology of higher education. In an interview with the HSE News Desk, Ulyana shared about how students’ prowess in key components of personal agency, such as self-efficacy, initiative, and self-direction, are related to their ability to adapt to and perform in distance 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.

Isak Froumin, Head of the HSE Institute of Education, has been elected a fellow of the International Academy of Education (IAE). Until now, its fellows had included only one scholar from Russia – Andrey Podolsky, formerly a department head at Moscow State University, and today, an HSE professor and department head at Innopraktika.