Publications

In moral panic studies, pro-ana communities are usually considered folk devils. Namely, pro-ana culture is investigated as an object of ‘moral crusades’ led by scientists, physicians, activists, politicians, mass media, parents and many other social actors concerned about the epidemics of restrictive eating disorders. In this paper, I put aside this strand of moral panic research and discuss the role of pro-ana communities as facilitators of moral panic to bridge the macro-micro divide in scientific investigations of the pro-ana phenomenon. I propose to examine pro-ana people as entrepreneurs of the moral panic over obesity. This means that pro-ana communities can be analysed as creating and spreading contemporary legends on obesity in their communication processes. Furthermore, I discuss and exemplify the roles of pro-ana people as amplifiers, supporters and enforcers of this panic. In addition, while reconnecting micro and macro levels in the explanation of the pro-ana phenomenon, I contribute to the development of moral panic theory, as the application of the concept of ‘moral panic’ to pro-ana communities facilitates niche formation in biomedical social research.

In this chapter, we analyze nationwide measures taken in Russia to organize the education system during the pandemic. We show the opportunities and limitations for responses associated relative to the previous policy phase. Special attention is paid to the peculiarities of a system reaction to the situation of a pandemic in a federative country with heterogeneous regions. In contrast to several other countries that adopted a single national strategy, different scenarios were implemented in Russian regions. We investigate the factors that influenced the scenarios and management decisions at the national and regional levels of the country. We highlight differences in the nature and dynamics of measures taken to organize learning in the first (spring–summer 2020) and second (autumn–winter 2020) waves of the pandemic. We also analyze the subjective experience and wellbeing of students and teachers during a pandemic. As the empirical base, we use data from several large sociological studies conducted in the Russian Federation over the past six months on the issues of school closures, distance learning, and the “new normal.” This provides a new perspective for studying the increasing education gap between children with different socioeconomic status due to the pandemic.

Russian public universities went fully online in the middle of March 2020. Many classes began to be taught remotely, some of them were replaced by online courses or postponed till the fall of 2020. These events significantly changed students’ lives and learning experiences. Based on survey data from more than 18,000 undergraduate students across the country, we revealed that the most common difficulties students face during distance learning are a poor Internet connection, a lack of interactions with peers and faculty, insufficient self-regulated learning skills, and lack of a convenient place to study at home. These problems are more common for students from families with low income, those who believe that distance learning is less effective than face-to-face learning, and first-year students. However, a third of students preferred distance learning to face-to-face. The results show that the employed, computer science students, students who believe in the effectiveness of online learning, those who experience fewer difficulties during distance learning, and those satisfied with the way that their university arranged the distance format are more likely to prefer distance learning over face-to-face learning in the future.

Publication is devoted to the analysis of the transformation of additional vocational programs in the social distancing due to coronavirus infection in the Russian Federation. The data source was the integration platforms providing training programs such as Coursera, Timepad, Edumarket.

The demand for educational courses increased by 2.5 times in the first half of 2020 due to the spread of coronavirus infection in the Russian Federation. Despite this only 19% are ready to continue their learning after the quarantine measures are lifted. In the first half of 2020 programs on integration platforms are currently focused on soft skills. There was an increase programs for stress resistance, leadership, productivity, business, hobbies and art, parent-child relationships, learning foreign languages. The share of programs with a high role of social communications has significantly decreased. However, there was an increase courses in IT (blog / website development, machine learning), medicine (ensuring safety in case of coronavirus infection, prevention of COVID-19, etc.).

The material will be interest to the heads of regional educational departments, specialists of the continuing education in universities, professional educational organizations, non-governmental organizations of continuing education, labor exchange and people who are involved in continuing education and self-learning.

 This chapter is aimed at providing insights into main engagement and disengagement factors in international doctoral students (IDS) experiences at Russian universities. Following the Tinto’s model of student departure, we look at two domains of IDS integration - social and academic. Based on data from 20 semi-structured in-depth interviews with IDS in three Russian universities we show that involvement in the university knowledge community and monetary support are the main factors of engagement that leads to positive IDS experience. At the same time language barriers, bureaucracy of the system of Russian higher education and an absence of a peer-support from the national communities are named among the main disengagement factors.

This paper studies the relationship between university institutional autonomy (both formal and informal) and their performance and efficiency using multi-stage empirical methodology. First, we measure an “autonomy-in-use” index, and then we employ Data Envelopment Analysis in order to evaluate institutional efficiency. Lastly, we use a panel fixed effect regression to provide robust evidence for the relationship between institutional autonomy, performance and efficiency. We find that formal status of autonomy does not predict higher publication activity or efficiency. However, the findings also reveal that informal autonomy is positively associated with efficiency scores, and advanced practices in staff management can contribute to increases in publication activity and overall institutional efficiency.

This article presents generalized model of collaborative actions, during which participants create, modify, and estimate digital objects. Such activities can be observed in numerous network communities. A prominent example is the repository of lesson scenarios of Moscow Electronic School (MES). The combination of methods of agent-based modeling and network analysis is used in the work. Using NetLogo environment in the frames of the model, an artificial community has been developed, where teachers-agents interact with scenarios-agents. Teacher-agent determines whether there are potential scenarios in his environment to be contacted with. If such scenarios are available, then the agent selects the nearest one and makes a step towards it. If the scenario has been opened by one of the teachers, then this is already an author’s scenario and the teacher-agent takes an action to reuse it. Variants of the reuse can be preset so that to correspond to the actions allowable in the environment of MES repository for learning scenarios: review, addition to bookmarks, running the scenario, downloading, using in home assignments. All these actions of teachers regarding scenarios are logged, then the log records are transformed into bipartite graph. The experiments demonstrate that while the area of participant scenarios is expanded, not only the general number of links among participants increases but also large networks of participants are subdivided into smaller and densely interconnected groups. One of the control trends of participant activities is in the use of multiagent-based modeling as a tool of collective reflection of teachers cooperating on the basis of MES.

School climate is a topic of increasing importance internationally. The current study investigated the established measurement invariance of an eight-factor school climate scale using a multinational sample of secondary students. School climate factor means across 14 international groups were compared and findings on the association between school climate factors and mental health were also investigated. Findings, from this study, illustrate several cross-national similarities regarding the ways in which secondary students perceive school climate and the influence of school climate on student mental health. These findings can support school psychologists’ efforts to identify strategies and supports that improve the school environment in areas that are most consistently related to student experiences, such as school safety and school connectedness. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.

Comparative and international education-related research is increasingly being integrated into the educational agenda of the countries of the global south. The global demand for being international and internationalizing drives universities across the world to bring an international aspect to their research whether it is learning from educational developments in other parts of international knowledge system or focusing their research activities on the periphery of that system. While this exchange of knowledge is a promising trend for enhancing comparative and international education-related research and reaching out to those areas that were previously isolated from the international knowledge exchange, the question that arises is whether the research findings reach those who can benefit from them the most – those who work in the field? This is especially relevant to the countries where English is not the first language. This essay discusses the issue of communicating research outcomes to the field using the example of Kazakhstan.

Most creativity assessment tools involve graphical solutions (images) evaluated by experts. Scoring with the engagement of human raters requires time and effort, and the automated scoring methods are insensitive to the content. As an alternative to both expert judgments and fully automatic scoring, machine learning (ML) demonstrated a great contribution to the field of  educational assessment. The present study investigates the possibilities of assessing student creativity based on ML for image recognition. The study postulates large-scale prospects for ML to assess complex educational and psychological characteristics.

There is a growing need for valid tools for assessing skills and certifying qualifications in the context of increasing labour migration and mobility. Due to the growing internationalization of business activities, companies are interested in standardized skills assessments that ensure valid and comparable ratings of job applicants and employees. At the same time, assessment of professional or vocational skills, which are highly domain-specific and numerous, remains challenging, especially in terms of comparability. Therefore, objective skills assessment tops the list of challenges faced by national VET systems.

This paper presents an overview of practices and tools for assessing vocational skills and VET learning outcomes, and covers the following issues: a) current practices and challenges in measuring vocational skills and learning outcomes in VET; b) initiatives for internationally comparable assessment of vocational skills, including PISA-VET and WorldSkills competitions; c) national initiatives for assessment of VET learning outcomes in the cases of Germany and Russia; d) labor market-and industry-driven initiatives in skills assessment for job seekers and qualification assurance. This paper contributes to the literature on skills assessment by providing a more comprehensive picture of approaches to skills assessments, including well-established ones and emerging initiatives outside the field of measuring learning outcomes in education.

In a moving world, the concept of competency appears flexible enough to adapt to the needs of societies and economies. From a more individual perspective, the development of skills that can be valued in the labor market would be a means of increasing employability. There are several challenges that students face when entering the job market in Russia. This note analyses several national policies within European countries that develop instruments to identify their economic migrant needs, even if one of the most glaring result is that there is currently no European common policy on economic migration and labor market needs. Nevertheless, the European Commission is trying new approaches in identifying sectors with unfilled vacancies. This note also elaborates on the success of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) approaches that consist of awarding full qualifications, partial qualifications, credits toward a qualification, exemption for access to higher education, and/or exemption of all or part of the curriculum to applicants that have been assessed and have proven that their experiential learning outcomes meet the standards used in the higher education system. The first part of this note identifies the obstacles that prevent international students from staying in Russia after their studies and integrating into the labor market. The regulation of the labor market and the lack of employability of these students are highlighted. These issues are rather specific to Russia and, therefore, Section III on international experiences show the added value of international students to the development of the stock of human capital and competencies.

Grit is widely considered a trait composed of perseverance of effort (PE) and consistency of long-term interests (CI) that is positively associated with educational and professional attainments. However, because of unclear relations between the two elements that compose grit, PE and CI, the theoretical model of the construct of grit is still questionable. On the one hand, we have extensive evidence that the overall score for grit can predict important life outcomes. On the other hand, predictive ability does not necessarily indicate that a measure reflects a unitary psychological trait. In the case of the Grit scale, a number of works have shown that treating grit as a whole or higher-order construct is psychometrically and psychologically unsound. In this work, we aimed to explore the relationship of PE and CI with long-term educational outcomes in desired educational trajectories while controlling for potentially confounding factors. We hypothesized that if PE and CI are facets of a unified grit construct, we would find consistent patterns in these facets for a range of educational outcomes. Our study was conducted on a large sample of students (N=3110) from a national longitudinal study of school and university graduates. These students were also participants in both the TIMSS-2011 and PISA-2012 studies. When the students were in 9th grade, we assessed their grit, academic achievement, and educational aspiration. The next year, we obtained information about the choices students made after completing compulsory education: staying in high school vs. obtaining vocational training. Two years later, we again assessed the students’ educational and life outcomes. We run two regression models. The first model was a model with PE and CI as predictors only. In the second model, SES, gender, cognitive ability scores and educational aspirations were added as covariates.  To test the mediation hypotheses, we also run regression models for possible mediators (educational aspirations and achievement) as outcomes. The results showed that perseverance was a better predictor than interests, although the effects of perseverance on long-term educational outcomes were more often indirect. Consistency of interests did not predict educational trajectories or achievement. Accordingly, we failed to find any consistent patterns in perseverance and interests with long-term educational outcomes. These findings are discussed in terms of  the nature of the grit construct and the validity of the Grit scale.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has revealed problems in school education using ICT. Teachers were forced to start teaching remotely using special, often unfamiliar to them software to communicate with students. The interaction in online lessons is very different from face-to-face classes. This is especially true for lessons with young children who overcome various barriers and may require outside support because of lack of ICT literacy or inappropriate software. However, teachers experience even greater challenges. At the beginning of the urgent transition to distance learning, teachers started to shape spontaneously their teaching methods, taking into account technical problems, such as students’ low speed of Internet connection or lack of webcams. Different teachers were dealing with such problems in different ways: for example, giving assignments on the textbook, and asking to send photos with answers. Besides, there are new barriers related to the order of the lesson. It is important to make sure that children are involved online, therefore there is a need in controlling the children's activity in distance learning, keeping the classroom discipline and sometimes parental involvement. The aim of the research is to identify barriers that hinder effective distance teaching in grade 5 according to teachers’ opinion. To address our aim we used data collected in May 2020 for Sber Gamification Lab research of digital interactive history materials. This research assumes a qualitative analysis. The data consists of 18 semi-structured interviews on multiple topics with history teachers of the 5th grade in Russian schools. Teachers face new challenges because of distance learning, and it is still unclear how to introduce a new lesson format of interactive e-learning, how to manage a lesson, and how to test knowledge remotely. There is no universal solution to distance learning, so it becomes difficult for teachers to provide exciting and engaging lessons. What solutions to these problems have teachers found? Our results showed that teachers began to use a variety of online-activities on history lessons. For example, it is noteworthy that one of the schools has its own Learning Management System (LMS), where the teacher has the ability to create their own tests and control students. It is also important to note that due to the introduction of interactive materials, teachers could not determine their role in the lesson. Some issues were connected with teachers’ digital literacy skills: some teachers did not know how to organize work in groups or pairs, some of them never used communication platforms such as Zoom before. The article concludes with recommendations for solving problems of organizing and conducting remote lessons.

The heritage of the ancient Roman politician, orator and thinker Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC), is considered as a set of texts that over centuries have been included in the curricula for humanities students, significantly changing the narrative tradition and detecting a way of understanding what is related to humanities. The key questions for the authors is the following: how and for what purposes was Cicero’s heritage presented to humanities students in educational texts in the first two decades of the 20th and 21st centuries? At the beginning of last century, scholars’ attention to Cicero was largely due to Augustus Samuel Wilkins (1843–1905), Paul Monroe (1869–1947) and his disciple Ellwood Cubberley (1868-1941). Many textbooks compiled by P. Monroe, A.S. Wilkins and E. Cubberley were published one after another. Thanks to the educational books of P. Monroe, A.S. Wilkins and E. Cubberley, different approaches to presenting Cicero's works for educational purposes were developed. It is these approaches that were reflected in educational books for humanists a century later. In Russian textbooks, sourcebooks, and anthologies on history of pedagogy, Cicero was mostly a figure of omission not only in the first decades, but throughout the entire 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century, many learning books for humanities students appeared. Their authors and compilers consider Cicero as an author who left a conceptual description of pedagogical reality (a detailed description of educational process) and chose a narrative description (description of what happened through the eyes of those who take part in it). We have to regret that the Russian domestic tradition of including Cicero's heritage in the content of humanitarian education has hardly undergone any changes over a century: fragments of his works continue to be presented on a small scale, are practically not grouped according to key issues, and rarely accompanied by pedagogical commentaries. The question of why some texts were selected while others were not, can be asked to every author and compiler who included Cicero's texts in their books for humanities students. The search for answers to this “eternal question” can be associated both with the flexibility of the humanitarian curriculum, and with the personal preferences of the authors and compilers of learning books.

Recently the World faced force push to distant learning caused by COVID-19 disease. Statistical numbers show a notable increasing number of users of corporate educational solutions utilizing cloud architecture. However, non-cloud-based learning tools do not meet this growth. In this work the authors consider the causes of that contradictory behaviour and present an explanation based on differences between two types of these educational systems. Also, the authors formulate an interpretation giving a list of extracted technologies or product features that allow corporate solutions to quickly gain popularity among educational society. In addition, clear examples of their connection to learning methods that can improve teaching, learning, and the last, but not the least a user’s experience are provided. And finally, the authors highlight a sig- nificant role of integration and interoperability standards supporting easy com- ponents replacement and scaling.

Studies showing improved learning performances for students who take notes collaboratively have speculated that sharing this task among group members may reduce the extraneous cognitive burden placed on each member. Therefore, a study (n=171) was conducted in the context of a fipped scientifc writing course to examine the efects of collaborative note-taking on student’s levels of cognitive load. Students in the course were divided into two groups, with members of the treatment group being directed to take collaborative notes in a shared online document and members of the control group receiving no such instructions. The study also measured the level of collaboration the collaborative note-takers engaged in, as well as the level of completeness of the notes that they produced. The results showed that, frstly, the treatment group reported higher levels of both germane and extraneous cognitive load compared to those of the control group, meaning that collaborative note-takers experienced higher levels of understanding of course content as well as increased confusion. Secondly, the level of collaboration was positively and signifcantly correlated with levels of germane load (understanding), but not with extraneous load (confusion). Thirdly, no correlation was found between completeness of notes and cognitive load. Accordingly, the authors suggest that collaborative note-taking is worthwhile, as the gains to students’ understanding of course content outweigh the disadvantages of increased confusion.

Context is increasingly recognised as a critical explanatory variable in accounting for commonalities and differences in human resource management. Giving expression to it in research models holds the prospect of enhancing theory development, deepening our appreciation of embedded practices in diverse territories, and opening up new lines of enquiry. However, contextualisation presents a significant research challenge and increasingly, international academic research networks that bring together scholars from different countries in the co-production of knowledge represent a key approach to rising to this challenge. This volume documents aspects of the development of one such network, namely the Cranet Network on International Human Resource Management, and presents a series of recent contributions from the network. The chapters highlight, inter alia, the limits to convergence in human resource management as a result of contextual determinism, the role of institutional actors, markets, and work regulation in accounting for variations in practices, the contextual specificities and dynamics at play in transition economies, along with key methodological challenges that arise when seeking to build cumulative comparative knowledge via network collaborations of this nature.

Although flipped instruction is becoming increasingly common, there is still discussion and debate regarding how to define it and distinguish it from other forms of instruction. This article proposes a framework with which to visualize the constituent parts of blended learning and to define what makes a course “flipped.” The definition of flipped instruction provided by this framework can be summarized as instruction that provides large amounts of information online along with face-to-face (F2F) engagement but provides little information during F2F meetings and has relatively low online interaction. This article also presents the results of an empirical study (n = 54) in which students in a flipped scientific writing course participated in an online discussion forum, and a correlation was found between posting discussion topics and scores on in-class group writing assignments. A further connection was found between scores on these group writing assignments and student performance on individual writing assignments. Based on these results, the study recommends that online discussion forums can be used to better connect the online and F2F components of a flipped course.