Group statistics: How often do you use icTs for the following?7

Question	Where are you from?	Mean
Sharing ideas	Russia	2,13
	USA	1,83
Contacting tutors	Russia	2,40
	USA	2,76
Making/Accessing lecture notes	Russia	2,47
	USA	2,02
Submitting assignments	Russia	2,34
	USA	1,87

Here we can easily see that HSE students use Internet for Sharing ideas less than GMU ones. Russians use ICTs more for contacting professors. This is an unexpected conclusion and as for us be explained by the fact that American professors encourage students to meet them after classes. According to our personal experience they usually invite student to meet them during their office hours and there is a specific option to make an appointment to discuss any problem a student face from literature research to the health issues and missed classes. It is also common there to show a draft of an essay to the professor who usually welcomes such behavior and encourage students to consult him or her if any difficulty occurs. But this is only a supposition that needs further research. Also we can see a difference in Submitting assignments. It is the fact that Russians use ICTs less for submitting assignments. HSE students admit that they have used LMS not often enough for this service to be efficient and they report that they have to hand in hard copies of their papers as an indispensable condition.

Touching upon the educational purposes we will study where from students study. We have observed that there are significantly more GMU students who use ICTs for study purposes from Cafeterias and Food courts than HSE ones. This statistical draw out can be proved by the eyewitness accounts. For the GMU students it is fine to study in a loud food court holding a book in one hand while grabbing a hamburger with another. It is interesting to mention that the percent of those who use ICTs from Cafeterias for studying equals the percent of those who use ICTs from there for personal purposes and is significantly bigger that the same figures from the Russian side of our research.

Now, we can talk about studying in detail and first we can have a look at how do students start an academic research.

To be vivid in our explanations we will draw a graph here.

I t is pretty visible that the most common way to use an academic research is to address an online search engine. We have drawn this graph here to demonstrate that the ICTs might be really helpful because online resources hold 4 first places of the most frequent ways to start a research. But the thing we are more interested in the fact whether there is a difference between the Russians and the American students.

And it turns out that there is variation and on the one hand more American students start their research by using Google scholar than Russians do. We suppose that it is mainly because this freely accessible web search engine is not well known in Russia and at the same time is not very good at searching scholarly approved sources in Russian.

At the same time, on the other hand, more Russians start their research by addressing recommended readings list and ask professors. As far as we are concerned this is because in Russia the tasks are usually made to use only the listed books and/ or articles.