The first year of university represents a challenging period that requires students to make significant investments in adaptive resources to face the new academic environment. The present study intends to contribute to the controversial discussion of gender differences in academic motivation, coping strategies, and academic burnout. This cross-sectional study examined above-mentioned constructs among first-year university students in a cross-cultural context. The sample consisted of 637 Italian and 496 Russian first-year university students (n = 1133), 40.3% of whom were females. The participants’ ages ranged from 17 to 23 years, with a mean age of 18.75 years (SD = 1.07). To assess academic motivation, coping strategies, and academic burnout, participants responded to the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS), the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS), and the Maslach Burnout Inventory–Student Survey (MBI–SS) application. The findings reveal gender and country differences in academic motivation, emotion and avoidance oriented coping strategies, and emotional exhaustion and expands previous studies in this educational area. Given the technical nature of the research topic, the target audience for our study is academic career guidance practitioners, who can apply the findings to the design of effective programmes aimed at improving positive academic goals and reducing the tendency to switch academic courses or abandon the university among first-year students.

This paper investigates British academics’ perception of international students’ alleged lack of critical thinking and poor writing performance. This research is relevant to those students and academics expected to demonstrate competences required for acceptance in the English speaking academic environment. The aim of this paper is to investigate in detail those factors that make British academics devalue academic material written in English as a second language. Using literature review and literature analysis as research methods, the authors present a detailed summary of problems associated with international students’ performance in the UK universities and conclude with a set of practical recommendations for Russian speaking students and academics.

The resources of power are usually understood as the entirety of means of influencing the object of power in accordance with the subject's aims. This paper investigates the phenomenon of Internet of Things (IoT, or Cloud of Things, or CoT) as an emerging resource used in the formation of the symbolic capital of power. As well as evaluating the potential of IoT already used in this capacity, the authors are also interested in clarifying and evaluating specific characteristics involved in its usage

Social theorists often neglect the fact that human beings are not only recipients but also producers of cultural meanings. Peirce's theory of semiosis highlights the active character of human agency. Introducing the notion of interpretant into semiotics, Pierce consideres the process of interpretation or interpretive thought to be a condition of signification, which necessarily involves an interpreting agent, a meaning-making human being. This paper offers a comparative analysis of Peirce's and Eco's theories of semiosis and examines the role of an interpreting agent involved in the semiotic process which is only possible in communication.

Digitization of everyday life has a fundamental influence on communications, information perceiving and thinking styles of modern generation students. The study of issues of emotional well-being in the student body is particularly significant today, because of increasing desocialization of young people. The aim of the paper is to implement and evaluates the effectiveness of the educational module for the development of emotional intelligence of the 1st year students of engineering Universities. The authors developed the educational module “Emotional intelligence”. The assessment of an empirical research using diagnostic tools of N. Hall’s test of emotional intelligence and the scale of emotional intelligence by D.V. Lyusin conducted on a sample of students (N=174) of engineering majors of Tomsk Polytechnic University. The results showed that most part of them has low and medium (closer to the lower border) levels of EQ. Positive dynamics were observed after studying the educational module. The quantitative indicator reflecting the number of students with a low level decreased two times, and the proportion of students with a high level of EQ increased from 2.9% to 11.1%. The maximum growth was noted for “empathy”, “recognition and understanding of emotions of others” (Hall’s test) and “interpersonal emotional intelligence” (D.V. Lyusin’s scale) indicators. The practically significant result is that development of the level of EQ will contribute to better adaptation in the educational space of the engineering University. The findings will be used for further scientific research to improve the educational paths of digital generation students.