Assistant Professor in Education

The Centre for Cultural Sociology headed by Dmitry Kurakin carries out theoretical and empirical investigations of culture and its paramount role within contemporary societies. Our primary interest concerns social inequalities and the various ways in which culture informs individuals’ identities, perceptions, rationales, actions, preferences, aspirations and decision-making patterns.

Social inequality is stubbornly rigid, persists in societies across the globe, and is often resistant to even the best-intended interventions.

Education, as one of the constitutive social institutions of modernity, provides perhaps the most potent vector to mitigate and reverse social inequalities. This informs our empirical interest in the life-course and education/career choice – the processes through which social inequalities emerge and reemerge in individual lives. By combining theoretical and empirical studies, and qualitative and quantitative methods, we seek to advance intra- and inter-disciplinary dialogue, while providing an ecosystem for the development of state-of-the-art cultural sociology and inequality studies. Conceptually, we adhere to Durkheimian perspective in cultural sociology, having regard to emotional dimension of culture and taking into consideration recent debates on the “cognitive turn.” In light of this, we seek to develop new advanced ways of formal analysis of culture related to these issues, in addition to more traditional means of qualitative analysis.

We run Russia’s most comprehensive longitudinal panel cohort study on education and career – “Trajectories in Education and Careers” (TrEC), which includes nationally representative panel of ~5k respondents, and a qualitative subpanel. We also lead the Moscow Culture Workshop, an international workshop in cultural sociology that includes leading scholars from a variety of countries.

Set up in 2011, the Center of Sociology of Higher Education is a vibrant platform for research in the field of Russian and international higher education. The center is academically oriented and focused on the following areas:

• International comparative research of students’ experiences and trajectories;
• Instructional design in Higher Education;
• Models of postgraduate training organization and their effectiveness;
• Scientific guidance of graduate students in Russian universities;

The Laboratory for Educational Innovation Research carries out comprehensive studies in the area of the formation, development, and transformation of the educational innovations’ ecosystem, the diffusion of innovative practices at the micro, meso, and macro levels, with a focus on the emergence of innovative growth points. The survival of innovations and their penetration into traditional educational organizations are of particular interest. An important feature of the Laboratory's work is close interaction with the Russian innovation community, innovation support funds, and active participation in the organization of educational competitions and accelerators, which provides an extensive empirical database and suggests the possibility of conducting field research and data collection.

The laboratory's arsenal of research methods involves a set of sociological methods, including quantitative (multivariate regression data analysis, self-diagnostic tools - TRI, Innova, SAMR) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews, focus groups, foresight sessions), as well as methods of semantic and ontological analysis, big data analytics, network theory tools, and a block of strategic analysis tools.

The main research questions that the Laboratory is addressing include:

- The innovative potential of the educational space participants in a changing world: the problems of education actors’ agency, the issues of identifying their motivations, attitudes, socio-cultural values, and thinking style concerning innovation.

- Institutional design and landscape of the educational system: the emergence of new niches in the educational market, the emergence of new, non-systemic actors, their competitive strategies, and their role in the development of national and regional innovative educational environments.

- Transformation of education and harmonization of top-down and grass-roots innovations: the path of the innovator, the policy of working with bottom-up innovations and support of educational start-ups and grassroots innovations

- Change management in educational organizations: cross-sectional studies of organizational profiles, expertise and self-diagnosis tools for digital and innovative transformation in organizations.

We welcome foreign researchers interested in applying their expertise to research on the topics of our Laboratory and actively disseminating their results in the scientific community for cooperation, as well as interacting with the expert community and performing the tasks of experts through consulting. We support an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the educational ecosystem and encourage developing new tools based on sociological, economic, and cultural-anthropological approaches to our research questions.

The Laboratory for University Development is a dynamically developing research center that undertakes scientific and applied projects in the field of Higher Education.

The Lab's R&D focus spans the following key areas:

• contribution of higher education to economy and society
• performance and efficiency of higher education institutions
• regional studies in higher education
• transformations of higher education systems under global, national and regional pressures
• diversity within university systems and institutions
• strategic management of universities
• equality of access to higher education

Established in 2000, the Centre for General and Extracurricular Education is engaged in a vast scope of basic research, applied developments and advisory support to underpin more robust, evidence-centric agendas for the development of secondary general and extracurricular education in Russia and beyond.

The Centre pursues multi-faceted research and aims to cooperate with various stakeholders to foster education equality across communities, promote appropriate teaching, ensure adequate financing and governance, and enhance learning outcomes.

The Center is launching a number of new regional projects to study various aspects of general education. In new projects, the Center will focus on the study of school social capital, educational poverty and the effects of extracurricular education, trans-regional/local features of the functioning and development of general education systems (also the possibilities of cross-border cooperation of education systems), models of the school management development as a complex adaptive system in social stress. Therefore, we seek for an international researcher in education with skills in either quantitative or qualitative methods. We welcome motivated scholars with research experience in the areas listed above and with knowledge of contemporary methods of statistical data analysis and with an interest in publishing in top international journals.

The mission of the Center for Modern Childhood Research is to become a globally recognized leading center of competence in the field of modern childhood research, early development and education, adolescence, and parenting studies.

 In our work, we actively use the methods of computational social sciences and new data sources, such as data from social networks and other digital traces. We explore psychological well-being of adolescents and how it can be predicted based on digital traces, online behavior of children, modern parenting cultures, children’s agency and self-directed learning, parental control, gender inequality, and new forms of inequality associated with parenting practices. We have a direct impact on parenting and childhood policies.

We are looking for scientists with research experience in the area of modern childhood & parenting research, computational social science or related fields and with knowledge of quantitative or qualitative data analysis. The candidates preferably also need teaching experience in advanced quantitative or computational methods at the master and postgraduate level. Programming skills (R, Python) are welcomed.

Set up in 2012, the Center for Psychometrics and Educational Measurement (https://ioe.hse.ru/en/cmqe) is engaged in multifaceted research, applied developments, advisory and professional networking in educational and psychological measurement and psychometrics.

The Center for Psychometrics and Educational Measurement is a leading research center in test development and psychometrics in Russia. It is involved in delivering a Masters’ programme Science of Learning and Assessment as well as a PhD programme in Education (track in Measurement and Evaluation in Education).

The Center is open for international cooperation, cooperates with leading foreign research centers and recognized experts from different countries of the world. Furthermore, there is a successful experience of involvement of international postdoc researchers and tenure-tracks researchers into Center’s investigations.

The Center’s expertise spans the following key areas:

• educational and psychological measurement (measuring complex constructs, including 4C and social & emotional skills, developing testing tools for skills and academic progress; adaptive testing; computerized testing; processing and interpreting test results)
• conducting multi-faceted research in the area of education measurement, including as part of collaborative international endeavors
• advising various institutional stakeholders on educational assessment and monitoring issues.

Since the involvement of the center in the university project Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Center (https://ncmu.hse.ru/en/), the center has such a new direction as the contribution of neurosciences to the improvement of education, within which it is supposed to use not only the psychometric approach, but also the methods of modern neurosciences to study human potential.

The laboratory conducts fundamental and applied research in the field of digital transformation of the education system and educational organizations in general and higher education, the use of new teaching tools based on digital solutions, their inclusion and impact on the educational process, the role of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning.

 We conduct a wide range of studies on the impact of digital tools and technologies on student success and educational outcomes. We have a direct impact on government policy in the field of digital transformation of education.

The Laboratory for Evaluation of Practices and Innovations in Education is a team of experienced scholars who provide a basis for evidence-based education policy in Russia and other countries.

The Laboratory collaborates widely with third-party organizations (governments, corporations, non-profits, research institutes) to evaluate policies, programs, and innovations in education (for example in EdTech). It focuses on high-quality large-scale survey data collection as well as large-scale randomized trials and quasi-experiments.

The role of the Laboratory is to help decision-makers in education to improve and equalize students’ educational outcomes.

The Centre for Vocational education and Skills development is a team of experienced scholars who provide a basis for evidence-based education policy in Russia and other countries.

The Laboratory collaborates widely with third-party organizations (governments, corporations, non-profits, research institutes) to develop and promote technology enhanced learning environment (TELE) in secondary and vocational education. It focuses on instructional scaffolding and its technological applications including personalized adaptive scaffolding systems.

The role of the Laboratory is to help decision-makers in education to provide learners with opportunities to explore their own interests in a flexible and enriching manner.