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Reading habits can be described as continuous lifelong need for gaining new knowledge, and are perceived by individuals as both a necessity as well as a source of satisfaction. The main reason for the stance that reading is both, a necessity and a source of satisfaction can be found in the fact that reading enables enhancement of personal development, as well as the advancement of the society as a whole. As there is a trend of reading crisis established by certain authors and taking into account the fact that developments in the field of technology have an impact on the alterations on means of reading, the reading habits are the subject of this paper, from the perspective of the students themselves as well as to their frequencies of reading books, newspapers, magazines, and the innovations in the reading process (the use of electronic vs. printed formats). After presenting the results of the secondary research, the results of the empirical research will be presented, in particularly as to the descriptive and comparative statistics on the reading habits amongst university students in the Republic of Serbia. The research was conducted on a sample of 1,148 examinees during the months of May and June 2018. The results of the empirical research have shown relatively high percentage of students who like to read (over 60% of students read frequently), and that students prefer to opt for printed books, and digital forms of newspapers and magazines. The results of this paper have shown the lowest frequency of reading books amongst the students in the sphere of technical and technological sciences as well as in the field of arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper, in theoretic terms deals with the phenomena of social networks and points out the possibility of their use as a technology innovation in university teaching. The central part of the empiric relations of the paper, them being the main purpose of this research, is the orientation of the students of teacher training faculties in Serbia towards social networks and their use in university teaching. The research was performed in the academic year 2012/13 on an appropriate and stratified sample of 208 students of the first and fourth year of Bachelor Academic studies and students of Master studies of teacher training faculties in Belgrade, Užice and Vranje. Besides the student preference of the use of social networks in education, the variables of the research are the year of studies and their attitude towards the use of social networks in teaching. The data was gathered through the survey and scaling techniques, and processed by the SPSS software package. The instruments used were a questionnaire and the Likert scale. Descriptive method was used to interpret the acquired data. The result of the research shows that the students of teacher training faculties have different opinions towards the use of social networks, and they have different attitudes towards the use of social networks in university teaching. One half of the surveyed students support and advocate this technology innovation, while the other half is against it or has no attitude whatsoever on the matter, which indicates that this phenomenon must be addressed with significantly more attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work is to test the hypothesis about the influence of students' socio-economic status (SES) on their school achievement. Many studies, including PISA results, reveal positive correlation bet-ween students' SES and their educational outcomes meaning that students with higher SES in average have higher school achievements as well. This paper is based on the assumption that the influence of students' SES on their educational outcomes is mediated by school anxiety and intrinsic motivation, and by formative assessment done by teacher. This hypothesis implies that the influence of SES would be annulled by introducing mediating variables in the structural model. Data analysis has been done on PISA 2009 data, which is collected on representative sample of Serbian students in the secondary education, counting 4843 students in total. The results show that three mediating variables explain small part of SES effect. Among these mediating variables, the most influential mediator is school anxiety - students with lower SES, in average have higher level of school anxiety, which consequently lowers their educational outcomes. Apart from that, students' SES does not influence significantly intrinsic motivation for school learning, which means that all students, no matter of their SES, can be motivated for school learning. Finally, the analysis revel that there is a positive correlation between SES and formative assessment done by teacher, but this correlation is very low, which means that high school teachers manage to apply encouraging practices toward all the students, no matter of their SES. Observed results suggest that, apart from the factors studied in this paper, there are some other which mediate educational outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Cyrillic is the only official script in the Republic of Serbia, for decades we have been experiencing the tendency of using the Cyrillic and the Roman scripts concurrently – nowadays it even seems that the Roman script is used more frequently in everyday life. The main aim of the paper was to investigate the attitudes of the students of the English Department (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš) towards using the Cyrillic and the Roman scripts, as compared to the population comprised of the students of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. The students of the English Department were chosen as the target group due to the fact that, in their everyday activities, they come into contact with the Roman script more frequently than the general population. Both populations filled in a questionnaire containing 30 closed-ended tasks, which expressed attitudes towards some aspects of the usage of the two scripts. The results show that the students of English were not in favour of either of the two scripts, whereas the control group proved to be more consistent in "defending" the Cyrillic script [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]