The Basic Principles of Training Future Teachers to Work With Younger Students With Experience of Traumatic Effects

The article shows that the unstable situation in the world leads to possible armed conflicts, affecting primarily children, experiencing various traumatic consequences. Such a situation arises in post-conflict regions and creates a need for teachers who possess the necessary competencies when teaching children with experience of traumatic effects. The purpose of the article is to study the state and trends in the development of psychological and pedagogical issues related to the use of collaborative learning technologies to form the psychological culture of future teachers in order to further work with children with experience of traumatic effects. It is shown that the analysis of the formation and development of the problems of group psychological corrective work is grounded on the basic principles identified by representatives of various directions. The authors propose to build the training of future teachers on the basis of a model of joint thinking for the subsequent organization of teachers’ interaction with children who have experience of traumatic effects. The authors analyzed the basic principles of group psychologically corrective work from the point of view of the possibilities of organizing joint thinking. The basic principles of the organization of training of future teachers were highlighted, their meaningful characteristics for the purposes of organizing joint thinking were given. A comparison of the principles of group psychological corrective work and the principles of the organization of joint thinking of future teachers is carried out. Their correlation and the importance of using joint thinking in organizing the training of future teachers and for conducting psychologically corrective work with children are shown.

Factors of Professional Activity of Educators in Pedagogical Practice

The indisputable importance of early learning as well as the accepted documents of international organizations dealing with education have an impact on educational policy in the Republic of Serbia. Systemic solutions support the professional progress of educators/preschool teachers. Clearly limited and publicly recognizable areas of practice, accumulated fund of knowledge acquired through education, experience, which is expanded and deepened by continuous improvement and exchange with the environment; independent and/or cooperative decisions on timely and correct actions; meeting internal and external standards (self / control); ethics in personal and professional life are characterized by professional/competent actions of educators. Factors that modulate the level of competence of educators are the status of society, the immediate social context, the quality of the study program, professional environment, continuous professional development, pedagogical practice, personal characteristics of educators, job satisfaction and private life. The paper critically examines the key elements of the structure of factors in the Republic of Serbia in order to put light on weak points and their improvement. The research of a set of macrosystemic and subsystemic factors points out to the necessity of restructuring, improvement of the quality of selection, basic education of educators, interventions in the offer of trainings in accordance with the real needs of educators. Ensuring an effective, respectful climate in the preschool institution is necessary for microsystem changes. Pedagogical implications are contained in the creation of conditions for the development of participatory relations, critical observation, but also the emancipation and independence of professionally accomplished educators.

The Order in The Structure of Motives of Activity: Quantitative Description

The purpose of the study is to conduct an empirical verification of the validity of the theoretical assumption that there is an order in the structure of motives of activity, which is determined by the proportionality between the significance of each motive in their aggregate significance and is quantitatively manifested in the parameters of the hyperbolic H-distribution ranked by the parameter. The necessary conditions for solving this problem are highlighted: a) structural elements - weakly functionally dependent on each other motives; b) in the structure of motives, the functional significance of each has a quantitative expression, which must be measured through the organization of empirical research; c) the measure of the total functional significance of all motives is limited by the situation of activity and the costs of obtaining its product. On a sample of students of the first, second, third, fourth courses of technical and humanitarian specialties (N=860) using the method of subjective assessment of the significance of each of the three motives for studying at the university in their combined significance (“acquisition of knowledge”; “mastering a profession”; “obtaining a diploma”) and using a given level of the average error of approximation of empirical results with an H-distribution of 10%, it was found that statistically, at a level of error probability less than 20%, students with an average error below a given level predominate. The possible formal and substantive reasons that led to a decrease in the validity of the result are named. The interpretation of the results in the context of the “junction” of systems theory and activity theory is presented. The directions of further research in the context of the proposed model are determined.

Relationship Between Facial Areas With the Greatest Increase in Non-local Contrast and Gaze Fixations in Recognizing Emotional Expressions

The aim of our study was to analyze gaze fixations in recognizing facial emotional expressions in comparison with o the spatial distribution of the areas with the greatest increase in the total (nonlocal) luminance contrast. It is hypothesized that the most informative areas of the image that getting more of the observer’s attention are the areas with the greatest increase in nonlocal contrast. The study involved 100 university students aged 19-21 with normal vision. 490 full-face photo images were used as stimuli. The images displayed faces of 6 basic emotions (Ekman’s Big Six) as well as neutral (emotionless) expressions. Observer’s eye movements were recorded while they were the recognizing expressions of the shown faces. Then, using a developed software, the areas with the highest (max), lowest (min), and intermediate (med) increases in the total contrast in comparison with the surroundings were identified in the stimulus images at different spatial frequencies. Comparative analysis of the gaze maps with the maps of the areas with min, med, and max increases in the total contrast showed that the gaze fixations in facial emotion classification tasks significantly coincide with the areas characterized by the greatest increase in nonlocal contrast. Obtained results indicate that facial image areas with the greatest increase in the total contrast, which preattentively detected by second-order visual mechanisms, can be the prime targets of the attention.

Students’ School Satisfaction: The Role of Classroom Climate, Self-efficacy, and Engagement

Students’ satisfaction with school is subjective, cognitive appraisal of overall positivity of school experiences, and precisely because it represents the key aspect of children’s overall perception of quality of life, it is important to find out what influences students’ school satisfaction and to which extent. The goal of this research was to establish whether self-efficacy and engagement function as mediating variables in the relationship between classroom climate and students’ school satisfaction. The research included 597 students from primary schools in Zagreb, Croatia. A structural equation model was designed and tested. The model testing showed that positive classroom climate has statistically significant and positive effects on self-efficacy and engagement. Furthermore, self-efficacy has a significant positive impact on explaining engagement. At the same time, negative classroom climate has a significant positive influence on engagement, which in turn contributes to the final effect on school satisfaction. The model has explained 56% of the school satisfaction variance in total.

Teachers’ Key Competencies for Innovative Teaching

The educational process is by its nature and essence very dialectical, so it necessarily requires teachers to have a developed whole set of various competencies. The aim of the research was to examine teachers on self-assessment of competencies that were crucial for innovating the teaching process. The sample of respondents included 1300 elementary and secondary school teachers in the territory of Southern Serbia. The instrument used was a five-point TCS scale of attitudes, with a total of 48 items (individual competencies). The results of the analysis showed that teachers, based on their self-assessments, highly value all diverse groups of competencies, which fully confirms the general hypothesis. The results also showed the existence of statistically significant differences in the degree of expression of attitudes about competency groups with regard to independent research variables, within special hypotheses, based on which the first was rejected, the second partially and the third and fourth special hypothesis fully confirmed. The issue of key competencies of teachers is certainly one of the fundamental issues when it comes to quality teaching, its innovation, generally successful and efficient dealing with the educational process. Based on these postulates, there is hope that the obtained research results will represent a good starting point and incentive for further research work in this field in the future.

Research Trends in Media Pedagogy: Between the Paradigm of Risk and the Paradigm of Opportunity

The use of computers, internet, and smartphones in the learning and teaching process has become an irreversible fact. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are now one of the fundamental teaching resources and even one of the principal teaching environments. The widespread use of ICT stands in positive correlation to the growing number of studies on educational aspects of the use of new media in schooling. The dynamically growing number of publications in this field requires reflection on the directions of research in the intensely developing sub-discipline of education science, i.e. media pedagogy. The aim of the article is to explore the two dominant directions of research on didactic and upbringing aspects of ICT use in education. The text presents the assumptions and processes assigned to both the opportunity paradigm and the risk paradigm of media pedagogy. These paradigms clash, giving rise to research directed at positive or negative phenomena related to the digitalization of schooling and educational processes. The text is an attempt to draw attention not only to the development of media pedagogy, but also to methodological errors resulting from anchoring research to only one trend.

The Role of Action Research in Teachers’ Professional Development

The challenges of contemporary education and teaching profession have resulted in an increased demand for the appropriate professional advancement and practice-based research. The action research is an approach that encourages teachers to manage and control their own work. This research was conducted with the purpose of being primarily beneficial for primary and secondary school teachers. The empirical research presented in this paper was based on the factor analysis, by which the research factors were extracted, as well as on the examination of the teachers’ attitudes towards methodological education, cognition and metacognition in teaching, reflexive practice, science education and lifelong learning in the context of the action research. The method used was descriptive together with the scaling technique and the five-level Likert scale (AISE) consisting of 29 items. The research was realized in 2020, and then retested in 2021. The number of 1021 teachers from the Republic of Serbia participated in this research. The research results showed statistically significant differences in the respondents’ responses related to the independent research variables: education cycle, teaching experience and the number of professional development seminars attended. The significance of action researches is reflected in the fact that the problems are resolved by the teachers themselves, not the scholars or academics who are not directly involved in teaching. Therefore, this research contributes to a greater motivation and support of teachers to raise their classroom activities and accomplishments to the level of a scientific research.

The Impact of Slovenian Qualifications Framework: Stakeholders’ Perspective

This paper examines the impact of the national qualifications framework on the education and training system in Slovenia in the context of the European qualifications framework for lifelong learning and its influence on the design of the Slovenian qualifications framework. Although the role of the European Union in educational policy-making has received considerable attention, of which national qualifications frameworks are part of, only a few studies have focused on measuring the impacts of the European qualifications framework influenced national qualifications frameworks in Europe. By drawing on the theoretical concept of policy transfer in the analysis of European/global education policies, the study shows how European qualifications framework policy transfer influenced Slovenian qualifications framework development through soft instruments. Furthermore, this study examined the extent to which the Slovenian qualifications framework’s objectives have been achieved according to key stakeholders (n = 50) using a quantitative research approach. The findings indicate that, unlike objectives related to the Slovenian qualifications framework’s reform role, i.e. support for lifelong learning, the objectives related to the Slovenian qualifications framework’s communication role, i.e. recognisability, understanding and transparency of qualifications and coordination of the qualifications subsystems, are mostly being met from the stakeholders’ perspective.