Private Higher Education in Russia: capacity for innovation and investment

This article considers the potential role of private institutions in the development of Russian higher education. After decades of a government centralised higher education system, there is a clear trend towards the privatisation of education institutions and the diversification of education practices. Some commentators consider this to indicate that the Russian State is losing control of education; others welcome private initiatives, both in formal and informal education. Russian higher education has also been greatly challenged by the current demographic gap: the total number of secondary school graduates expected in 2012 is half that of 2006. This strengthens the competition for the enrolment of students in private and public (federal and municipal) institutions. Based on recent interviews with senior management at a number of provincial private universities, this article suggests possible avenues for private universities to extend into the education market and considers the implications.     

The impact of structured teaching methods on the quality of education in Brazil

This paper estimates the impact of the use of structured methods on the quality of education for students in primary public school in Brazil. Structured methods encompass a range of pedagogical and managerial instruments applied in the educational system. In recent years, several municipalities in the state of São Paulo have contracted out private educational providers to implement these structured methods in their schooling systems. Their pedagogical proposal involves structuring of curriculum content, development of teacher and student textbooks, and the training and supervision of teachers and instructors. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we find that the 4th- and 8th-grade students in the municipalities with structured methods performed better in Portuguese and mathematics than did students in municipalities not exposed to these methods. We find no differences in passing rates. A robustness test supports the assumption that there is no unobserved municipal characteristics associated with proficiency changes over time that may affect the results.     

THE EFFECT OF IDENTIFICATION AND DIFFERENTIAL TREATMENT OF GIFTED ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PUPILS

Within the framework of a comprehensive research project entitled “The effects of identification and specific treatment of gifted pupils”, this paper deals with the problem of the effects of such a procedure on the attitudes of pupils, their parents, and teachers regarding giftedness and gifted individuals. Attention was mainly directed towards the effects of identification on the development of personality characteristics of the gifted pupils, on relations between gifted and other pupils, on the characteristics of teachers necessary for work with the gifted, on the controversy about separation of the gifted into special classes or schools, and on society's obligations to the gifted. The results of this two year follow‐up study are based on a comparison of the data from the initial and the final surveys of an experimental and a control group of subjects.

     

Evaluation of Energy Saving Operational Modes for Industrial Fracture Connected Processes on the Basis of Incubation Time Fracture Criterion

A problem for a central crack in a plate subjected to plane strain conditions is investigated.Mode Ⅰ crack loading is created by a dynamic pressure pulse applied at a large distance from the crack.It was found that for a certain combination of amplitude and duration of the pulse applied,the energy transmitted to the sample has a strongly marked minimum,meaning that with the pulse amplitude or duration moving away from the optimal values,minimum energy required for initiation of crack growth increases rapidly.The results obtained indicate a possibility to optimise energy consumption of different industrial processes connected with fracture.Much could be gained in,for example,drilling or rock pounding where energy input accounts for the largest part of the process cost.Presumably further investigation of the effect observed can make it possible to predict optimal energy saving parameters,i.e.frequency and amplitude of impacts,for industrial devices,e.g.bores,grinding machines,and hence significantly reduce the process cost.The prediction can be given based on the parameters of the media fractured (material parameters,prevalent crack length and orientation,etc.).     

A scaleable document clustering approach for large document corpora

In this paper, the scalability and quality of the contextual document clustering (CDC) approach is demonstrated for large data-sets using the whole Reuters Corpus Volume 1 (RCV1) collection. CDC is a form of distributional clustering, which automatically discovers contexts of narrow scope within a document corpus. These contexts act as attractors for clustering documents that are semantically related to each other. Once clustered, the documents are organized into a minimum spanning tree so that the topical similarity of adjacent documents within this structure can be assessed. The pre-defined categories from three different document category sets are used to assess the quality of CDC in terms of its ability to group and structure semantically related documents given the contexts. Quality is evaluated based on two factors, the category overlap between adjacent documents within a cluster, and how well a representative document categorizes all the other documents within a cluster. As the RCV1 collection was collated in a time ordered fashion, it was possible to assess the stability of clusters formed from documents within one time interval when presented with new unseen documents at subsequent time intervals. We demonstrate that CDC is a powerful and scaleable technique with the ability to create stable clusters of high quality. Additionally, to our knowledge this is the first time that a collection as large as RCV1 has been analyzed in its entirety using a static clustering approach.