European Journal of Contemporary Education

686-695

Authors: Tatiana A. Antopolskaya, Margarita I. Logvinova, Alexander S. Silakov, Viktor I. Panov

The article reveals the theoretical and practical aspects of the development of adolescent’s personal agency in the environment of additional education. A theoretical analysis of studies that determine the set of personal characteristics of adolescents of generation Z is presented. The author substantiates the author's understanding of the personal agency of a teenager as an integrated characteristic of his personality, manifested in his ability to self-organize and self-realize, build effective social communications, social interaction and moral and value relations with others, aimed at satisfying his activity needs in world-building. Additional education institutions are characterized as spaces that provide a high level of intensity of joint activities and communication of adolescents, opportunities for various activities, a positive psychological atmosphere of cooperation and creation with peers and adults. The thematic content of the additional educational program "Social Testing Ground" is presented, which allows developing creative abilities and leadership potential, as well as improving those qualities of adolescents that made it possible to increase their level of personal agency. The program involved the development of four modules: social-individual, social-communicative, social-interactive, social-moral. The methods for studying the development of personal agency of adolescents are described. The results of a longitudinal pre-experimental research design are presented, during which a complex impact on the personality of an adolescent was realized, which allowed him to more productively realize his self, readiness to express and defend his own opinion, accomplish goals both independently and in creative interaction with other people. The high efficiency of the socially enriched environment of additional education for the formation of the personal agency of the younger generation Z has been confirmed.

707-717

Authors: Agne Brandisauskiene, Ausra Daugirdiene, Olga Iurasova, Egle Kemeryte-Ivanauskiene

Inclusive and high-quality education must provide equal opportunities for all pupils to learn leaving no child behind. Different studies show that secondary education is an area where boys are disadvantaged and also that young people, especially girls, are not enthusiastic about learning the exact sciences at school. There are many and various factors (individual personal, social, and cultural, school context) that determine pupil gender differences in mathematics achievements. Recognizing the impact of all these factors on pupil learning and achievement, this research focuses on clarifying how mathematics achievements of pupils (girls and boys) are related to the activities of teachers of different genders (female or male). The research includes data on47581 learners and their 594 mathematics teachers, who were selected from forms 5-10 (basic school) and forms I-IV (secondary school) in 179 Lithuanian schools during the period 2012-2021. The results of the study suggest that in the surveyed sample of Lithuanian schools the majority of teachers teaching mathematics are women and the achievements of girls in mathematics are higher than those of boys in all primary and secondary school classes, except for classes 5 and 7.However, the differences in the work of female and male teachers are very small and the achievements of pupils (girls and boys) in mathematics are not related to gender-determined activity characteristics of teachers. The presented regression model of mathematics achievement of pupils (girls and boys) hardly differs from the actual results, which means that all the presented coefficients of the characteristics of the teacher’s work affect the work of teachers (irrespective of their gender) and, accordingly, the pupils’ mathematics achievements.

727-745

Authors: Yulia M. Gruzina, Khvicha P. Kharchilava, Marina A. Ponomareva, Garri A. Kashper

Currently, the youth movement is represented by a variety of forms, which provides vast opportunities for choosing the most suitable and interesting association for a young person. Although a return to the model of a united youth organization, which was the Komsomol organization in the past, is unlikely possible, since this idea will not find a response among young people and will contradict modern social values, youth public organizations at the present stage can apply their activities in a wide variety of directions: sports, works, ecology, patriotism. The secondary employment of young people, which suppose the organization of activities of youth associations on the basis of educational institutions, has also received proper support. At the same time, the student movement has pursued the social maturation of young people, their involvement in the process of professional labor formation historically, in addition to the economic component (the development of economic relations, additional financial support to young people). Nevertheless, the political transformations of modern Russia have established a completely new phenomenon of Russian youth, what distinction is disunity and split into various social and economic segments that are weakly or not at all connected with each other. Thus, the social component of the functioning of student organizations, which contributes to the direct formation of personality, is not fully reflected today. That is why the issue of organizing the activities of student youth associations requires detailed research, which should include an analysis of the experience of implementing youth association programs on the basis of educational organizations and the particularities of various models of this vector in social policy at the present stage. The models of cooperation of youth representatives on the basis of educational organizations are reviewed, and also the opinion of representatives of this population group regarding the current conditions for the formation, functioning and provision of youth organizations and associations within the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation is examined in this article. As a result of that analysis, the evaluation of knowledge intensity degree of the student communities of the Financial University and Russia, as a whole, is established, and methodological recommendations for the further development of student organizations are provided, considering the individual opinions of their participants.

760-777

Authors: Duong Thi Hong Hieu, Pham Thi Huong, Thai Hoai Minh, Nguyen Hoang Thien

The article presents different teacher education models around the world with a focus on a few countries, namely Singapore, Thailand, New Zealand, Finland, and the US as well as models in Vietnam. It is evident that countries apply different models instead of one to initial teacher education and Vietnam is no exception. Besides the two popular teacher educationmodels, the concurrent and the consecutive ones, under specific circumstances, the “combined” model, called A+B, has been implemented in some Vietnamese universities to meet the needs of teachersand jointhe teaching profession of society and individuals. The studyprovides more information on the possibility of implementing the A+B model for an independent university rather than a member university within a system of universities, where this model has been applied for quite a long time, through the design of the training program for some programs in the same sectors at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education. This idea is hoped to be a reference for teacher education programs in diversifying themselves, especially for those in Vietnam as most of them are organized in independent multidisciplinary institutions which provide bothteacher education programs and non-teacher education ones like the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education.

791-806

Authors: Fatemeh Khonamri, Nasibe Arab, Peter Majda ,Zita Jenisova

Homework assignments have been explored from several different perspectives over the past few years. Learners’ views and their practice of homework have been explored in different disciplines. This study attempted to explore English language learners’ perception on and their practice of homework throughout a term of study. To this end, 110 adult male and female EFL learners agreed to participate in this study. Questionnaires and subsequent semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data. SPSS Software was used to analyze the questionnaire data and content analysis was used for the interviews using content analysis. The results showed that students had a positive perception towards homework assignments. Moreover, the results also revealed that learners had certain difficulties in doing homework assignments. They stated that mostly the difficulties are due to some specific reasons namely not learning the required concept, not knowing the instruction, not enjoying the homework, not paying attention, not understanding homework instruction, anxiety and stress of homework. The results offer a number of pedagogical implications for teachers, curriculum developers, and managers of language institutions.

817-830

Authors: Ekaterina A. Mamaeva, Elena K. Gerasimova, Olga Yu. Zaslavskaya, Liubov A. Shunina

The future teachers training involves the formation of competencies for the development of software for various purposes, design of automated systems for managing real objects. The development of relevant qualities in higher education is complicated by a number of problems of a different nature. The authors propose to organize the project activities of students to create interactive programs (training bots) to improve the training of future specialists. Methodology. Project-based learning is used to form competencies in the field of informatization of education, to obtain in-demand soft skills, and to unite the team. The construction of a chat bot takes place in teamwork. The experiment involved 43 students of the North Caucasian Federal University in area of training 44.03.05 Pedagogical education with two training profiles. The assessment of the quality of educational results was carried out using the author's testing of 10 tasks (“passed”/“not passed”). Fisher's test was used to establish statistically significant differences. Research results. Students study services for creating chat bots, analyze the didactic potential and functionality of the programs received, and apply them to solve problems. The features of the presented variant of the organization of educational activities on the creation of chat bots are described: teamwork, the use of templates and scripts, the choice of project topics. In conclusion, problematic questions are formulated, the answers to which make it possible to determine the directions of work on the design of chat bots: discussion of the development goal and didactic goal, the use of blocks and actions, modeling interaction scenarios, etc.

846-857

Authors: Sanja Skočić Mihić, Ksenija Romstein, Esmeralda Sunko

The benefits of high-quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as a prerequisite and opportunity for development, especially for children and families at risk of social exclusion, are widely recognized. High-quality educational practices for children at risk of social exclusion (RSE) should be flexible and aligned with their individual needs. This study uses a national stratified random sample of 1,142 Croatian preschool teachers to examine how they perceive the quality of educational practices regarding children at RSE. Preschool teachers perceive conditions and opportunities for quality education of children at RSE in ECEC by providing activities that promote diversity, building partnerships with parents, and children's development and learning. Perceived conditions and opportunities for children with RSE were related to teachers' formal education level: their master's degree and prior participation in training on developmentally appropriate practices for children with RSE. Only one-fifth of the teachers had recently participated in in-service training on children with RSE, indicating the need for high-quality teacher in-service training to acquire skills to support this group of children and their parents. Teacher in-service training can improve the perception of better conditions and opportunities for quality pedagogical practice that addresses the individual needs of each child at risk of social exclusion.

873-884

Authors: Carlos A. Rojas-Kramer, Némesis Larracilla-Salazar, Aristides R. Baraya

Mathematical anxiety has been studied frequently over many years, so different scales have been developed for that purpose. The aim of this study is to assess the five-factor model of Muñoz and Mato (2007) within the context of a public school. Therefore, the scale designed by these authors, which consists of 24 items integrated in five dimensions, in a 5-point Likert format, is used. Hence, 200 Mexican high school students were surveyed from a non-probabilistic self-determination sample. The data gathered showed a Cronbach alpha score of 0.751, reflecting acceptable internal consistency and reliability. However, it showed kurtosis of 9.521, indicating the lack of normality. As a consequence, the Bootstrap technique was used for this study in addition to the exploratory factor analysis. The data were analyzed using the IBM Statistic SPSS 25 for descriptive analysis, and the AMOS 24 software was used to determine the validity of the model. The findings report that the results turn out to be different from those expected by the original authors of the scale since a significant model was obtained explaining math anxiety configured by a four-factor structure instead of a five-factor one. Given that these findings could be a consequence of the socio-cultural conditions of the students in the sample, further studies are recommended.

898-913

Authors: Elena V. Soboleva, Tatiana N. Suvorova, Mikhail I. Bocharov, Tatyana I. Bocharova

Development of linguistic diversity, creative ideas in foreign language communication are key areas of international activity supported at the UN level. An important condition for effectiveness of any dialogue is the verbal creativity. Personal preparation for professional creative thinking, for overcoming verbal stereotypes takes place in professionally oriented communication. The authors suggest using interactive resources of flash cards in teaching when developing students' verbal creativity. Methodology. Flash card learning is based on the Leitner method. Flash cards are also used for speech development (vocabulary, morphology, word formation, syntax, pronunciation), and psychological processes leading to new results (fluency, originality, flexibility). The author's testing includes blocks “Vocabulary”, “Morphology”, “Word formation”, “Syntax”, “Pronunciation”, “Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking”. The experimental study was carried out at Vyatka State University. 60 fist-year students of the training program “Psychology” (bachelor degree level) are involved. The Lexilize resource is used to create flash cards. Results. Students study services for creating flash cards, use them to process new material, memorize and present concepts, word formation in a variety of contexts. In conclusion the features of the presented version of using flash cards in education are described: combination with other means (mobile applications, simulators, infographics) and traditional forms of information transfer; interdisciplinary connections. The rules are formulated, implementation of which ensures effectiveness of using flash cards for development of verbal creativity.

931-945

Authors: Paloma Suarez-Brito, Jose Jaime Baena-Rojas, Edgar Omar López-Caudana, Leonardo David Glasserman-Morales

The profound transformation within higher education institutions is increasingly evident. Then, it is considered that education must adapt to meet the needs of qualification and skills development in a 21st century with diverse challenges in problem solving. This is reflected in the role that academic literacy is increasingly taking as a strategy to innovate teaching among university students. The objective of this scoping review is to complete a characterization of complex thinking in both academic literacy and higher education. All this, providing an overview on the central theme and its incidence in the production of relevant literature published in the Scopus database. About 139 research works were considered in the article, which become thematic references for the exercise proposed here. Then, a description of all the works consulted was completed, recognizing mainly their origin, citations, publication, and other aspects that will ultimately be essential to differentiate the term academic literacy from the processes of reading and writing as educational competencies. Therefore, in general, the conclusions indicate that complex thinking has indeed a relationship with academic literacy not only because of the works traced but also because complex reasoning brings together within people a series of skills that facilitate the execution of advanced actions and the solution of problems.

962-971

Authors: Ruslan M. Allalyev, Alexey V. Dyuzhov, Lyudmila Yu. Novitskay, Sergey N. Rozhnov

This paper explores the periodical press of the Ministry of Public Education in the Russian Empire in the period from 1803 to 1917. Insight is provided into the Ministry’s both official and narrowly specialized organs. The following journals of the Ministry of Public Education were examined: Periodicheskoe Sochinenie o Uspekhakh Narodnogo Prosveshcheniya, Zhurnal Departamenta Narodnogo Prosveshcheniya, Zapiski Izdavaemye ot Departamenta Narodnogo Prosveshcheniya, Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniya, Izvestiya po Narodnomu Obrazovaniyu, and Professionalnoe Obrazovanie. Use was also made of some reference literature. Methodologically, the study relied on a set of general research methods. Of particular note is the use of the historical-chronological method (the journals were considered in chronological order). The use of the systems method helped examine the Ministry’s periodical press as a system, with characteristics considered such as period of publication, place of publication, number of issues published, and editorial personnel. Between 1803 and 1917, a total of six journals were published in the Russian Empire under the aegis of the Ministry of Public Education. The first three were published from 1803 to 1829, a period that can be regarded as the time of the making of the Ministry’s periodical press. This is when fundamental decisions were made regarding publication formats, content, and periodicity. In 1834, the Ministry launched the monthly Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniya, which would be published up to 1917, and during the subsequent period only narrowly specialized publications were published, including the popular science journal Izvestiya po Narodnomu Obrazovaniyu and Professionalnoe Obrazovanie, a journal concerned with vocational education. In terms of editorial personnel, of particular note is the fact that the Ministry of Public Education never employed unknowns to manage its periodical press, with most of its editors being prominent researchers and specialists in the area of printing or censorship.

981-993

Authors: Artyom Yu. Peretyatko, Vladimir A. Svechnikov

At the start of the 1860s, pedagogical thought in the south of the Russian Empire entered a period of brisk development. The administration of the Kharkov Educational District keenly promoted pedagogical research – and did so even among ordinary gymnasium teachers. This led in 1863 to a public discussion about how to teach language arts. A young teacher at Novocherkassk Gymnasium named A.M. Savelyev (later a journalist and high-ranking regional official) approached the administration of the Kharkov Educational District with a detailed description of his classes and a report on the overall situation around language arts instruction with the aim of obtaining professional advice from his more experienced fellow instructors. The response to him came from a Kharkov University professor named N.A. Lavrovsky, a well-known pedagogue in the second half of the 19th century. In addition, the discussion resulted in language arts instructors in the District being asked to share with the administration details of their teaching programs. This discussion may be of particular interest to those interested in the history of Russian pedagogy and may provide a valuable insight into the daily pedagogical process in the gymnasium. The findings indicate that as at the start of the 1860s the Russian gymnasium sector was in need of a coherent system of teaching the Russian language and literature, with most facilities lacking a proper curriculum and an appropriate textbook. Some teachers would come up with a textbook substitute of their own, and others would dispense with it altogether, resorting, at worst, to going through random texts in class. As a consequence, many students would end up with poor results. To the discussion's participants, the only solution to the problem was creating a quality textbook, which, as many argued, would require systematizing the best practices of various pedagogues, but it was not something that could be done overnight.

1004-1012

Authors: Timur A. Magsumov, Teymur E. Zulfugarzade, Mikhail B. Kolotkov, Sergei B. Zinkovskii

This set of articles relies on reference and memorandum books from the period 1873–1917 to explore the development of the system of public education in Astrakhan Governorate. This is the first piece in the set. It examines the region’s geographic, economic, and social characteristics and provides an insight into the state of affairs in its education sector as at 1873, i.e. the study’s lower chronological limit. The principal sources used in this study are the Memorandum Books for Astrakhan Governorate, relevant statistical descriptions, and relevant laws and regulations. Use was also made of relevant archival documents from the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (Kazan, Russian Federation). These sources contain official correspondence on the organization of the educational process in the region. Methodologically, use was made of sets of historical (historical-systematic, historical-comparative, historical-typological, historical-genetic, and historical-statistical) and general (synthetic analysis, content analysis, and systems analysis) research methods. The system of public education in Astrakhan Governorate was not as advanced as that in many other regions of Russia. There were difficulties, especially in the early 19th century, associated with the Russification of the region. As at 1873, the governorate had 38 educational institutions with a combined enrollment of 2,395 (1,702 boys and 693 girls). The period 1837–1873 was a time marked by brisk development in the region’s female education sector, when its boy to girl student ratio changed from 8.8:1 to 2.45:1.

1021-1031

Authors: Anvar M. Mamadaliev, Valentina S. Nikitina, Natalia V. Svechnikova, Irina Yu. Cherkasova

This set of articles explores the development of the system of education in Penza Governorate, a region in the Russian Empire, in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries (through to 1917). The present paper is the third part of the series. It examines the timeframe from 1895 to 1915. In putting this work together, use was primarily made of relevant documents from the Russian State Historical Archive (Saint Petersburg, Russia), memorandum books, reference books, and the journals of the Ministry of Public Education Narodnoe Obrazovanie and Obrazovanie. The following historical research methods were employed: historical-comparative, historical-typological, historical-systematic, historical-genetic, and historical-statistical. The general research methods employed in this study were analysis of the literature and sources, systems analysis, and mathematical methods. A key conclusion drawn from this study was that the period under review witnessed a steady rise in the number of educational institutions in the region. This especially was the case with its lower and primary educational institutions. Vis-à-vis the early 1870s, the region’s student body grew nearly 10 times, with the largest increase accounted for by its rural residents and the population of its capital, Penza. Most of the region’s secondary and lower educational institutions had a pronounced agrarian and technical orientation, while its primary education sector was dominated by parochial schools. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the region began to follow a national trend and witnessed an increase in the number of female students, which especially was the case in cities (a boy to girl student ratio of 1.39:1), as girls tended to attend a trade (vocational) school with a view to being later employed in the field of processing agricultural and livestock farming output. The region’s rural residents followed traditional (patriarchal) values, with literacy and education not generally considered important for rural women, which explains the boy to girl student ratio of 3.4:1 in the region’s countryside at the time.

1039-1047

Authors: Irina Yu. Cherkasova

This work is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of Cherkas Global University, a private research organization. It traces the evolution of this organization from a military historical society to a university and outlines some of the key characteristics of its development. The primary source drawn upon is ‘Cherkas Global University (1992–2022): A Collection of Documents’, a collection of published works that includes 50 documents spanning the period from 1992 to 2022. In addition, use was made of periodical press materials, namely relevant materials from the newspaper Vestnik Leib-Gvardii. In terms of methodology, use was made of the following traditional principles: systematicity, objectivity, and historicism. The integrated use of these principles helped to transform a vast, scrappy patchwork of data into a systematized body of knowledge, synthesize this kind of information, consider the line of events in a historical sequence, and arrive at conclusive results. The author’s conclusion is that over the 30-year period the organization has come a long way since its inception in 1992 from a regional military historical society in the city of Sochi to a private research university in Washington, DC. In this period, the organization has built a fruitful relationship with its foreign partners, including colleges in the world's top 100. The organization has its own publishing house, which handles top-rated journals. There have been projects on indexing scholarly journals on the university’s platforms and popularizing research in the area of history. The university has acted since 2020 as the organizer of the annual research contest ‘Slavery in the Past and Present’. In addition, the university is distinguished by significant publication activity, with a focus on research topics such as the history of world civilizations and professional and pedagogical training. The above allows us to look to the future with optimism and take pride in our past and present achievements.