Russian Federation New Skills for New Century: Regional Policy

As part of the World Bank’s analytical support program in Russia, the team has been working with their Russian counterparts on collecting and analyzing data in order to gather evidence to inform coherent policies and strategies for creating modern schools and for promoting 21st-century teaching and learning in Russia. Both goals are being pursued through a series of national projects aimed at: (i) modernizing teaching and learning; (ii) putting Russia in the top 10 countries in terms of scores on international assessments; and (iii) expanding school infrastructure to ensure full-day schooling throughout the country. This new report presents a rigorous analysis of the data collected as part of the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 2019 complemented by data on Russia from the OECD’s School User Survey (SUS), which was also fielded in 2019.  The analysis provides descriptive statistics related to the learning environments and teaching practices in Russia and draws some correlations between learning environment variables and learning outcomes. Furthermore, the study shows how different teaching styles affect student learning in the mathematics, science, and cognitive (reasoning and applying) domains of TIMSS. The team also analyzed the wellbeing construct included in TIMSS 2019. 

This study was prepared by a multidisciplinary team led by Tigran Shmis (Senior Education Specialist) under the guidance of Harry Patrinos (Practice Manager, HECED) and Renaud Seligmann (Country Director for Russian Federation, ECCRU). Contributing authors are Maria Ustinova (Education Consultant), Dmitry Chugunov (Education Economist), Ekaterina Melianova (Consultant), Suhas Parandekar (Senior Economist) and Lucy Kruske (Consultant).

Tigran Shmis is a Senior Education Specialist of the World Bank in Moscow office. Tigran works under educational projects in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Romania, Serbia and Peru. Among those projects are: the Yakutia Early Childhood Development (ECD) project, Russian Education Aid for Development (READ), Khanty-Mansyisk ECD infrastructure development technical assistance, Kyrgyz ECD project, Belarus Education Modernization Project and Serbia ECD project, technical Assistance on Safer Schools development project in Peru. 

Publication is published under ‘open access’ or under the author’s permission and copyright of the work belongs to the author.