Student scientific societies: from institutional form to pedagogical content

The aim of the study is to identify the relationship between the institutional form (a set of external, normatively and organizationally fixed characteristics) and the pedagogical content (the organization of a student’s progress in research: support, presentation of results and their recognition in the curriculum) of student scientific societies (SSS) in Russian universities, taking into account international experience in organizing student research. The key idea of the paper is that the institutional form of a student scientific society is a necessary but insufficient basis for the development of a student’s research position: such a position develops only where the society’s activities are filled with pedagogical content. The paper presents the results of an analysis of regulations and open data on student scientific societies of 355 Russian universities, a content analysis of publications from 2018 to 2026, and a comparative pedagogical analysis of forms of organizing student research in Hungary, Poland, the USA, and Germany, undertaken to identify elements of pedagogical content that are common to different countries and independent of organizational form. The scientific novelty lies in distinguishing between the institutional form and the pedagogical content of SSS activities, in describing the pedagogical content as a three-level structure (infrastructural-procedural, subject-positional and propaedeutic-methodological levels) in which tutoring support acts as a cross-cutting mechanism, and in identifying invariant elements of pedagogical content shared by different forms of organizing student research. It has been established that the institutional form of student scientific societies in Russian universities has largely taken shape (they operate in 93.8% of the universities examined), whereas their pedagogical content – student support, intermediate forms of presenting results and the recognition of results in the educational process – is hardly regulated in local acts. The comparison of Russian practice with international experience has shown that, despite differences in institutional forms, effective forms of organizing student research share three features: institutionally established mentoring, crediting of research results in the curriculum, and the iterative presentation of these results.