The main goal of the secondary vocational education system is to fulfill the staffing needs of the Russian economy. The only way that we can effectively deliver on this objective is by ensuring there is a well-coordinated and stable system in place that allows vocational schools to cooperate with businesses. This article reviews how this…

In this study, we explore how career orientations of Russian high schoolers are related to the quality of their academic capital. We introduce and validate the concept of the academic capital of high school students. We describe why we chose Schein's Career Orientations Inventory as a screening instrument, which allows us to determine whether the…

The article investigates the quality of the answers given by school-age children in survey questionnaires. We present the results of a systematic review of studies dedicated to the socioeconomic status of the family. By answer quality, we mean the ability of children to correctly indicate the educational attainment and profession of their parents…

The article demonstrates that the extent and mode of adolescent participation in social networks have changed with the rapid development of social media technologies. If, at the time when they were first introduced, social networks complemented direct communication and were studied as a separate additional space, now, because of the development of…

Despite the fact that the family is extremely significant in the system of values of young people (in Russia), the number of divorces is increasing in this population group. Our analysis of this contradiction establishes that young people need to be specially prepared for family life. The paper presents the results of a large empirical study…

The present article treats changes in the learning environment of contemporary children as exacerbation of the "childhood crisis." We believe that new research in the field of developmental psychology is required in order to apply cultural-historical theory to new data. The article presents two studies: one of them considers a preschool…

The paper proposes a model of educational strategies for college entrants that makes it possible to assess the investment efficiency in additional preparation as evidenced by the Unified State Exam [USE] scores. It was found that college entrants still use traditional forms of preparation despite the new institutional admission conditions at…

These days labor training of the rising generation has been made more difficult by the fact that a certain contingent of that generation lack a solid motivation to work. There is a shortage of systematic and intelligent promotion of skilled blue-collar professions. On the basis of an analysis of a sociological field survey the author looks at the…

The paper presents the results of a large-scale study on the scope of extracurricular education services and an assessment of the potential role of education outside the classroom and informal education in solving children's socialization issues. The study was carried out by questioning students as consumers of education services. A new instrument…

The PISA 2009 data (in reading) investigated the effectiveness of one year of schooling in seven countries: Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, Canada, and Brazil. We used an instrumental variable, which allowed us to estimate the effect of one year of schooling through the fuzzy method of regression discontinuity. The analysis was…

Data from a comparative study of the educational, career, and migration strategies of rural school students in Russia, China, and Kazakhstan show high levels of educational aspiration. This is likely to increase the flow of population to urban areas, to increase the rate of urbanization, and to have demographic and economic consequences that will…

Changes in educational policy in Russia will affect the proportion of young people who obtain their occupational qualifications in a university and in secondary-level professional training schools. There is currently a shortage of skilled blue-collar workers in Russia, and more needs to be done to ensure high-quality training for this sector of…

Sociological surveys have shown that education in Russian society today still remains a valued priority to young people. It is in demand by a substantial portion of secondary school graduates who are hoping to continue their education in an institution of higher learning. The modernization of graduation and entrance tests, associated with the…

This article was prepared on the basis of materials from four regional survey projects conducted in Krasnodar krai in 2005 through 2009 at the behest and with the support of various municipal and regional bodies of authority: (1) "Problems of Today's Schools" (2005-6, a survey of students in the ninth through eleventh grades in twenty…