Educational events

ECA-CES experts examine the latest available developments in the field of education quality assessment and education management. Cooperating with leading research teams, ECA-CES provides opportunities to try new assessment methodologies by carrying out a full cycle of work on creating and piloting. This includes researching and examining ideas, financing, examining the implementation of developing tools, promotion in international space, evaluating the effectiveness of using the developed tools and their implementation into educational systems in partner countries.

On December 17^th the groups of developers working on creation of new version of SAM tool presented a new version of the tool that can be used for assessment of the educational results in physics. It was a results of a work on investigation the possibility of using SAM in other subject areas of the school curriculum. Based on SAM taxonomy and in the framework of the theory of cultural development of Lev Vygotsky a fundamentally new package of analytical tools was developed addressed directly at the teacher who is building a pedagogical strategy with a focus on elements of the methods of developmental education.

Virtual seminar was attended by colleagues from Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus.

Following the cancellation of the onsite CIES conference in Miami due to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), organizers shifted to a virtual meeting space with the goal of providing an engaging and meaningful experience for those who had expected to attend.

CIES 2020 “Education Beyond the Human” has originally envisioned a small virtual conference pilot, which scheduled to open on March 15, 2020. The original virtual conference pilot included paper sessions, with pre-recorded presentations grouped around a particular theme and invited discussants. Virtual Poster Presentations were accompanied by short audio recordings and included a discussion area to engage with the author(s) and each other.

With the great support from the World Bank Russia country office some of our colleagues attended the conference to participate in a poster session and round table discussion. They presented their work in frames of the International Research on Student Achievements.

IRSA is focused on education quality improvement through regular thorough monitoring of student’s achievements in mathematics and determining their relationship with factors of educational environment. For the achievement of this goal researchers created a set of assessment tools and localized them in different countries’ cultural context. The developed toolkit allows not only measuring student’s current academic performance and its correlation with various factors but also predicting future subject achievements. Knowing of what needs to be achieved in order to receive better educational results will allow planning and implementing interventions at the class/school level.

ECA-CES conducts scientific and practical seminars dedicated to issues of joint projects and preparation of specialists for the work in these projects. Scientific and practical seminars are conducted in partnership with leading organizations of the sphere of education quality assessment in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

During the seminar in Minsk, the following topics were discussed and agreed: further plan of joint work in the framework of IRSA project; analysis and expert discussion of the mid-term results including results of research activities; formats of presentation and dissemination of results of research at national and international levels.

Along with the research results, the seminar covered the issues of using automated software systems for testing and processing of monitoring results, along with presenting data collection results when conducting IRSA research and generating reports on monitoring results.