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Pedagogy as a social-humanistic science that deals with upbringing and education expresses its complexity through a plurality of ideas, understandings and opportunities for studying, learning and researching educational practice. The methodology dealt with by experimental and quasi-experimental pedagogy is exact and serves to establish reliable data, i.e., it searches for facts and evidence that can replace research hypotheses. A synonym for quasi-experimental pedagogy is “new pedagogy” because the evaluation of research quality in educational practice can be defined through the methodological basis of research, originality, novelty and significance. The question arises: how many quasi-experiments have been conducted so far that researchers are not even aware of, that is, they have not called this type of research by its real name? The main goal of theoretical research is to analyze the crucial differences between non-experimental, experimental and quasi-experimental research. From the presented goal of the research arises the research task which is reflected in seeking to affirm quasi-experimental research in pedagogy with the aim of bringing closer to the scientific public the characteristics and advantages of quasi-experiments in terms of streamlining implementation and practicality in the natural school environment. The paper uses the theoretical analysis method with the content analysis technique. The authors presented conclusions about the importance of quasi-experimental research as a special epistemological-methodological approach in determining the causality of educational phenomena.

Reflective practitioner teachers should critically review their own work and introduce innovations that should improve everyday educational practice. For this reason, the focus of the research is on the personal and professional empowerment of reflective practitioner teachers during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic. 355 teachers from the Republic of Serbia participated. The empirical research used descriptive methods and techniques of scaling and surveying with an instrument specially constructed for the needs of this research - Questionnaire with assessment scale (RP-COV-19). The results show that the most common form of empowerment is attending online seminars, while teachers rarely attended online classes of colleagues from the school where they work and colleagues from other schools. Teachers' perceptions on the use of the Internet in the aspect of personal and professional empowerment are very positive. Teachers generally rate their training and engagement during the pandemic with the highest marks (four and five), while there were no negative marks at all. Reflexivity accompanied by personal and professional empowerment must be given priority by teachers, because in today's process of education, reflective practitioners are considered successful teachers. Keywords: teacher reflective practitioner, professional empowerment, the Covid-19 pandemic, empirical research, improvement of educational practice.

The new era of the 4IR requires changes in teachers’ initial education and in their professional advancement. Serbia is a developing country whose institutions of education are technologically underdeveloped and whose expansion in the field of digitalization is still insufficient to be on par with the developed western countries. The authors’ research goal was to determine whether potential improvement in teachers’ digital competences has occurred. The general hypothesis postulated implied a low level of the use of digital tools in schools on the territory of Serbia. The descriptive method and scaling technique were used. The research results show that science and technology teachers apply digital tools while teaching more frequently than the teachers of social sciences and humanities. The research implies that a strategic approach to Serbian teachers’ digital education is necessary even during their undergraduate studies by introducing digital technology courses and subjects in the conventional academic curricula. Keywords: Education, Digital competences, Teachers, Serbia, Fourth Industrial Revolution

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.