On January 27, ISET students delivered yet another policy seminar. A presentation entitled “The Quality of Secondary Education” was delivered by Mariam Chachkhiani, Lika Goderdzishvili, Dika Khidesheli, and Tevos Matevosyan under the supervision of a senior research fellow in the Education and Social Policy Center at ISET-PI, Zurab Abramishvili. During the presentation, the students overviewed the current situation and indicators of the quality of secondary education in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, with further emphasis made on problems facing Georgia.
At the beginning of the presentation, the students showed a short video on the Finnish education system, “where learning is meant to be fun”. Students have no homework, with both short school days and semesters. The Finnish system perceives standardized test-based system (like in US) to be studying for test; it does not encourage students to learn. Another important point is that private schools do not exist in Finland, and Finnish people think that neighborhood schools are the best.
On January 26, ISET hosted an Asian Development Bank (ADB) group with keynote speaker David Margonsztern, the Senior Urban Development Specialist of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He gave a presentation entitled “The ADB’s Sustainable Transport Initiative (STI): Turning Strategies into realities”. The ADB started this project in 2010 with the priority of developing transport systems that are accessible, safe, environmentally-friendly and affordable in Asia. Mr. Margonsztern emphasized that the project is targeted to increase the share of urban transport among other means of transportation. Compared to the situation in 1970-2009, when the share of urban transport was only 2%, but after implementing the STI project, the share of urban transport increased to 18%. By 2020, the project aims to reach a 30% share for urban transport.
On December 15, 2016, Dr. Natalia Velikova, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University (TTU), held a lecture on Focus Group Discussions for the researchers of ISET-PI. Natalia is an Associate Director of the Texas Wine Marketing Research Institute. Currently, she is a Fulbright scholar in Tbilisi and works on the Development of Wine Marketing and Wine Tourism Strategies for Georgia.
Natalia started her presentation by outlining the main differences between quantitative and qualitative research and suggested some criteria for choosing between these two approaches. Afterwards, she introduced Focus Group Discussions (FGD) as one of the methods used in qualitative research and listed research goals and questions to be addressed with FGDs.
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