Ethical Educational Data Processing Differences of Students with Special Needs in Post-Soviet Countries

Abstract

Countries adopt different strategies and policies to ensure the implementation of ethical data processing and within this framework, they may encounter challenges. In this paper, we analyze the main issues regarding ethical data governance of students with special needs in post-Soviet countries and compare them. The reason why we selected post-Soviet countries as our case study region is that these countries went through different education and data privacy-related policies after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results indicate that these differences can be tremendous. For example, Estonia positioned itself as the best of all non-Asian countries and economies participating in PISA, and in seventh place in the overall ranking. However, students from countries like Uzbekistan, Georgia, and Azerbaijan performed lower than average PISA scores of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This disparity highlights the important role ethical data governance plays, not only in education but also in broader socio-economic outcomes. It emphasizes the necessity of understanding these countries' various ethical educational data processing practices. Our findings show that the main challenge is bias in the data collection, where certain groups of learners are not involved. The second main challenge is about the accountability and transparency of data where most of the collected data by different organizations do not align