Nowadays we live in a world full of data, that surrounds us everywhere. Data helps us to test hypotheses, recognise patterns, and make discoveries, whether it is primitive or complex; heterogeneous or homogeneous (Larose & Larose, 2014). Research and data are intertwined. They are interconnected with the most important stages of academic pursuit, i.e., collection and analysis of information. The data analysis is designed to recognise the patterns and achieve clarity in the phenomenon under study.
Data plays a specific role in any science. In education, for instance, it helps to enhance the quality of teaching (Bienkowski et al., 2012). Personalisation of education becomes more accessible. Qualitative and quantitative metrics of a student’s academic progress and preferences allow teachers to choose the content, tempo, and methods of teaching, depending on the student’s individual needs. Moreover, those metrics provide the means for the academic progress prognosis, and, when in university, academic attrition. The content, namely, the educational programme can be improved with the help of the gathered data. A collection of learning assessment materials can be updated to ensure the quality of education. The data is also significant in the management of an educational institution. The administration is able to track the finances, plan the budget, and effectively coordinate the whole system on the basis of the data. Likewise, it is interconnected with innovations in education, helping in the development of new online courses, e-textbooks, and apps focused on ensuring availability and learning efficiency.
Working with data implies its visual representation. There are many guidelines and papers on the graphical representation of the data (Maaten & Hinton, 2008; Glazer, 2011; Yau, 2024). The most significant aspects will be covered hereinafter.
Author : Aydar Kalimullin
Editorial: BRICS Countries on the Improvement of Teacher Education
Modern processes of globalization and international integration have a serious impact on the teacher training system not only in Russia, but all over the world. This process involves new agents, increases its universalization, transforms its content, develops new educational technologies, creates innovative systems of evaluation and accreditation of future and serving teachers, and gradually digitalizes teacher education. All these trends are challenges for teacher education systems in all countries of the world, including the BRICS countries. They require the development of new algorithms of activities; complicate the communication processes of all participants of teacher education.
When conducting comparative research on the basis of contrasting the unique and the common, the priority is to find a special universal methodology that will allow to act effectively in different contexts and ensure the quality of modern teacher education (Menter et al., 2017).
Quality of Teacher Education in International Studies
This special issue of the Education and Self-Development journal presents articles based on the presentations of Russian and international colleagues at the 9th International Forum on Teacher Education (IFTE) held May 24–26 at Kazan Federal University.
One of the main missions of KFU is to unite the efforts of Russian and foreign scholars in the study of topical issues of teacher training. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, the Russian system of teacher education was only fragmentarily represented in the international scientific and pedagogical community. Meanwhile, the historical past, traditions, features of political and socio-economic development have formed a rather interesting educational system in Russia. Therefore, the main philosophy of our scientific activity, an important element of which is the IFTE, has been and remains cooperation with scientists from around the world, studying the best educational practices, objectively covering the history and current state of teacher training in Russia, comparing them with global trends and processes taking place now or taking place at a particular historical stage.
Editorial: teachers’ professional development in global contexts
This special edition presents a snapshot from around the world of the current
state of the research devoted to the issues of professional development of teachers.
Teachers’ professional and pedagogical activity is significantly changing today (Teacher
education in a time of change, 2016). In many respects, these changes are explained by
a new understanding of the purpose and result of education, which is formulated in the
documents of educational reform in Russia and in the world, in the context of achieving
a new quality of mass education (Valeeva & Gafurov, 2017). The question that becomes
extremely important is: “How exactly should the teacher’s professional and pedagogical
activity change in order to provide a new quality of education meeting the “challenges
of the time?”