Tag "students"

A study by Ivan Smirnov of the IOE Educational Data Science Lab uses machine learning to analyze over 7 million social media posts

While a good deal of students readily embraced online learning, there were also many of those who felt less comfortable completing their coursework remotely due to technical difficulties. First-year students had the hardest time adapting to the new format, and low-income students also encountered many challenges. These are some of the findings from a joint survey conducted by IOE, the HSE Centre for Institutional Research, and the Institute of Distance Education at Tomsk State University.

Last week’s session held as part of the World Bank–HSE University joint webinar series, ‘Education under COVID-19: Problems, Solutions, Perspectives, Research’ brought together international experts and participants from various corners of the globe to delve into students’ learning experiences amid challenges and limitations stemming from the COVID emergency.

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.

At a recent webinar held as part of IOE’s Year 2019/20 Series on Educational R&D, Ivan Smirnov, Head of the IOE Laboratory for Educational Data Science presented about how students’ ‘digital footprints’ can help leverage our understanding of mental well-being in adolescents and the way it is related to academic achievement.

Experts at the HSE Laboratory for Media Communications in Education have come up with findings from a large-scale survey they have conducted in association with the HSE Institute of Education, which aimed to gauge how well school teachers have been able to transition online amid Covid-19 directives that have temporarily shut down conventional learning. In all, 22,600 teachers from 73 Russian regions have been interviewed. The results propose that the overall assessment of how comfortable the Russian teacher corps have found themselves taking instruction to the digital dimension is more optimistic than what was first thought back to when schools had just set about moving online.

The ‘digital age’ of education has whirled in like a hurricane. Long-term, systematic strategies for the transition to online learning have been swept away by global challenges, and primarily the COVID-19 pandemic and measures to counter it. IOE research fellow Daria Shcheglova reflects on how some students might have been overlooked in this head-spinning rally to take education online.

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.

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.

While doing their Doctorate at the HSE Institute of Education, students take research internships with IOE’s world-renowned partner institutions as an important compulsory part of the PhD track. Upon returning to IOE after she had completed her research abroad program at the University of Oslo (Norway), PhD candidate Farida Zagirova was only too glad to talk to IOE News on how this internship opportunity came about and what exactly it contributed to her academic career.