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Higher education institutions are considered as the main bearers of socio-economic development of society in general. Having in mind that quality is considered as an important part of institution's responsibility as well as its' sustainability, it is necessary to provide a holistic approach that would cover all processes in the institution and offer students and other stakeholders the expected standards of professional and competent functioning in all aspects of life and work. On that basis, every higher education institution tend to design and implement scientific research and professional work in various fields, and to promote and nurture creative and critical thinking values, academic integrity and professional ethics. Dedicated to this mission, many of them attempt to establish themselves as reputable HEI's in the country and the region committed to the standards of the European educational space, endeavoring to develop science, academic community, local and regional social community. Vision of many faculties is oriented toward becoming recognizable in the international academic community by constantly striving to meet as higher as possible educational, scientific and academic community standards, but also, in accordance to their original principles and actions, to contribute to the development a culture of quality in the society. Therefore, the quality management of a higher education institution is a process that continuously and systematically follows-up over a long-time period whether the established system of quality assurance, monitoring and control is effective and adjusted to proclaimed European standards. Purpose of this presentation is to gain insight into to current developmental state of quality management in HEI's in relation to the proclaimed standards.

The aim of this research was to determine which leadership style is perceived as the most dominant by the secondary school students, when the teachers' behaviours are presented through transformational, transactional and passive-avoidant leadership components. The perception of teacher leadership styles was also investigated in relation to various socio-demographic parameters. A total number of 500 secondary school students of final grade from Nis in the Republic of Serbia, participated in the research. Since this research was based on Transformational and Transactional Theories, information about teacher leadership style and leadership factors was collected through the adapted Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire - MLQ (Avolio & Bass, 2004). The research results indicate that, according to the students' perceptions, secondary school teachers practice both transactional as well as transformational leadership style, i.e., in the schools covered by the research a full range leadership model is articulated. Also, the research confirmed that variables such as gender, school type, educational profile, academic performance of the participants affect the perception of teachers' leadership styles.

Playfulness in adulthood has been shown to be un-researched scientific issue. We believe that it is because of earlier non-recognition of this issue as a special field of study, but also the existence of a popular belief that the playful activities are reserved only for children. Just because of the lack of initiative and coherent researches that take into account playful activities in adulthood and characteristic of playfulness as a personal trait this research can be considered as the first research of that kind in the Republic of Serbia. The aim of this research is to determine adult perceptions of their playfulness and dominant cognitive qualities of playfulness. Adult Playfulness Trait Scale was used (APTS, Shen, Chick & Zin, 2014) to explore adult playfulness and inherent cognitive characteristic of this personal trait. Research sample consists of 1234 adult individuals aged from 18 to above 60 years from a cities and villages of Serbian area. The results of this research show that respondents recognize and highly value all tree sub-dimensions of playfulness trait: fun-seeking motivation, uninhibitedness and spontaneity. An important finding of this research is one that indicates on the characteristics of fun-seeking motivation sub-dimension as dominant one.

Research interest in comparing education took place in parallel with the study of society and social achievements. Contemporary context, in which there is interdependence and reciprocity, demands re-focusing on the role of comparative research in analyzing the structure, resources development, social function of education in relation to the position in the structure of the world. In this paper, by analyzing the methodological characteristics, with special overview to the methods, seeks to highlight the problems of comparative researches and ways to overcome them. From the theoretical point of view, changes will be considered as well as analyzing the arguments about the need to mixed-methods approach in comparing educational phenomena. At the same time it seeks to identify tendencies which reflect both directions and contradictions in the development of comparative research, as well as the factors of this development.