Research & Expertise

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.

Students cheat and plagiarize more if they believe most of their classmates to do just all the same. A recent study by Evgeniia Shmeleva and Tatiana Semenova, experts at the IOE Center for Sociology of Higher Education, looks at how factors of learning environment, and specifically the way students perceive the stance towards dishonest practices that their peers espouse, act as modulators of academic dishonesty.

The tenth International Russian Higher Education Conference (RHEC) kicked off at the HSE University Moscow this week and will last until October 25. Bringing together over 400 participants from 15 countries, this year’s forum focuses on ‘Contributions of Higher Education to Society and Economy: Global, National and Local Perspectives.’

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.

In late September, IOE hosted the Second Russia–China Conference, Digital Transformation of Education and Artificial Intelligence. The event has offered a multifaceted forum for leading experts from the two countries to foreground and share the most important research, policy and practical perspectives in how the digital stride has been remolding various dimensions of the national education systems.

Bullying is a problem that has plagued school-age education worldwide. Methods that stakeholders harness to alleviate bullying often fail to produce an effect as significant and lasting as originally expected or sometimes even further aggravate the state of affairs. Arthur Rean and Maria Novikova, experts at the IOE Laboratory for the Study of Adolescent Deviance, believe that effective and sustainable remedies for bullying invariably imply a comprehensive approach that proposes an increased policy emphasis on programs to counter adolescent aggression alongside more systemic and focused efforts by schools to foster reciprocity and supportive psychological climate. 

Moscow has recently welcomed a premier cohort of international experts in psychology and psychometrics representing OECD, other global organizations, national R&D hubs, etc. for the 16^th European Congress of Psychology, one of the world’s most established academic venues to comprehensively tackle a diverse theoretical and applied agenda in the field. IOE scholars Tatjana Kanonire, Ekaterina Orel and Alena Kulikova took part in the Congress to contribute to the discussion of findings from the pilot stage in the large-scale international Study of Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) project that is spearheaded by OECD.

From June 24 to 25, the University of Bologna, Italy, which is the very cradle of the European university tradition with its history spanning as far back as 1088, welcomed over 1,000 academics and institutional leaders from 70 countries for an international conference, Bologna Process Beyond 2020, that celebrated the 20^th Anniversary of the Bologna Declaration. IOE experts Isak Froumin and Pavel Sorokin took part in the forum to present novel research insights into the role of education in building future-proof human capital for socio-economic growth.

Radomir ‘Ray’ Mitic just completed his PhD at New York University and will be joining the Council of Graduate Schools as a postdoctoral fellow this coming fall in Washington, D.C. This summer, he received an HSE SemyonovAward Research Internship to study civic engagement among Russian university students at the Institute of Education at HSE University. Last week, he participated in the International Summer School on Higher Education Research in St. Petersburg, and now he is conducting field research in Moscow. We spoke with Ray about his research, his impressions of the two Russian cities, and his future plans.

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