In this study we modelled possible causes and consequences of student burnout and engagement on academic efficacy and dropout intention in university students. Further we asked, can student engagement protect against the effects of burnout? In total 4,061 university students from Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Finland, Serbia, and Macao SAR, Taiwan participated in this study. With the data collected we analyzed the influence of Social Support, Coping Strategies, and school/course related variables on student engagement and burnout using structural equation modeling. We also analyzed the effect of student engagement, student burnout, and their interaction, on Academic Performance and Dropout Intention. We found that both student engagement and burnout are good predictors of subjective academic performance and dropout intention. However, student burnout suppresses the effect of student engagement on these variables. This result has strong implications for practitioners and administrators. To prevent student dropout, it is not enough to promote student engagement—additionally, and importantly, levels of student burnout must be kept low. Other variables such as social support and coping strategies are also relevant predictors of student engagement and burnout and should be considered when implementing preventive actions, self-help and guided intervention programs for college students.

Academic engagement describes students' involvement in academic learning and achievement. This paper reports the psychometric properties of the University Student Engagement Inventory (USEI) with a sample of 3992 university students from nine different countries and regions from Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. The USEI operationalizes a trifactorial conceptualization of academic engagement (behavioral, emotional, and cognitive). Construct validity was assessed by means of confirmatory factor analysis and reliability was assessed using Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's omega coefficients. Weak measurement invariance was observed for country/region, while strong measurement invariance was observed for gender and area of graduation. The USEI scores showed predictive validity for dropout intention, self-rated academic performance, and course approval rate while divergent validity with student burnout scores was also evident. Overall, the results indicate that the USEI can produce reliable and valid data on academic engagement of university students across the world.

Student dropout from school is a serious problem in educational systems all over the world. This paper will provide an overview of the various dropout definitions and their consequences for measuring and monitoring. Since a diversity of factors (individual, familial, school and systematic) is connected with student attrition in foreign research, the attempt has been made to systematise their results and provide data regarding similar Serbian studies. Considering the fact that there are no systematic analyses of students' dropout rate in Serbia, the existing data from primary and secondary schools from a variety of statistical sources will be presented. We conclude that one way to reduce dropout in Serbia is to further develop research interest in the topic, as well as the strategies for monitoring, prevention and intervention.

This work is an attempt at empirically establishing a relation between leisure and values in adolescents. Being new, this topic could help a broader understanding of youth leisure and its association with inner psychological dispositions, but also with specific social context (prolonged economic crisis and post-war environment). Five typical leisure patterns were previously identified: academic, sports, going out, following celebrities in the media and music, and computers pattern. The main objective was to discover whether students with high and low scores on these patterns differ regarding their values. The sample consisted of 2426 SERBIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT Serbian secondary school students from 9 towns. A discriminant analysis was performed and showed that it was possible to identify a specific mix of personal and social values for every leisure pattern. This confirms the existence of a relation between students' behaviour during free time and their values, expressed as a preference for specific personal and social goals. The resultss imply that connecting two domains is achievable and fruitful in both ways. The identified leisure patterns contribute to a more detailed and elaborate portrayal of adolescents' values but those values also bring a new insight into specific features of adolescents' behaviour during leisure time.

Logical Operations Test (BLOT) was developed for assessing the transition to formal operational thinking. BLOT is a 35 item multiple-choice test which examines all of the operations which comprise the logico-mathematical structure of formal operations in Piaget’s theory. The test was translated into Serbian and used in previously reported research. This work deals with two additional parallel versions of the Serbian BLOT. For each original BLOT item two more parallel items have been constructed by changing the item content and leaving the logical structure of the item the same. Sample consisted of 517 primary and secondary school students. Rasch analysis confirmed that the vast majority of items maintained invariance across at least two test versions: for 19 original items both parallel items maintained their invariance, for 14 items one of the parallel items had similar parameters and only 2 items did not remain invariant in the parallel tests