Over the last three decades, topics relating to young peoples leisure time have become increasingly more present in academic literature. Among the numerous studies that delve into this subject, results point towards a relationship between the way teenagers spend their leisure time and their gender. In this study we wanted to answer the question if gender differences were evident in the way secondary school students in Serbia spent their leisure time. This problem was not looked into in more detail among secondary school students in Serbia. We conducted a survey on a sample of 922 secondary school teenagers from the 1st to 4th grade (ages 15-19) from nine Serbian towns. Research in this field commonly uses the rating scale. In this paper we have constructed an instrument that represents a methodological innovation in approaching a particular set of problems. It was a questionnaire. The task was to name all the activities they participated in, and the time frame in which the activities took place, over the course of one weekday and the Saturday of the previous week. The activities which best differentiate these two groups of surveyed teenagers are: sports, studying, computer use, spending time at friends' homes and grooming. We did not discover differences in participating in creative activities while foreign studies show that such activities are more typical for girls.

Systematic failures in attempts to modernize Serbian society during the past two centuries have led to the survival of traditionalist value orientations. The long period of Ottoman rule allowed patriarchal, warrior-tribal cultural patterns to persist and shape the basis for national and overall cultural identity. Extreme poverty, autarkical agricultural production, the slow penetration of capitalism and a market economy, an undifferentiated social structure with majority of rural population, patriarchal organization of both the private and public sphere and the authoritarian character of authority, were characteristics of Serbian pre-modern society, which inhibited its development and contributed to the persistence of traditionalism. Although the socialist period was modernizing in many respects, homology between socialist and pre-modern collectivist, egalitarian and authoritarian orientation, made it easy for nationalism to penetrate and consequently led to decomposition of the state in civil wars. Delayed post-socialist transformation, characterized by civil war, economic collapse, extreme impoverishment, and international isolation, has only strengthened the orientation towards pre-modern patterns of identification. This paper examines the persistence of collectivism, authoritarianism and patriarchal orientation in the period of unhindered post-socialist transformation, based on the data obtained in the "South-East European Social Survey Project" (SEESSP), conducted from December 2003 to January 2004. These results are compared with those obtained in the research project "Changes in the Class Structure and Mobility in Serbia", conducted in 1989

The main goal of the study is to define dialogue dimensions in order to describe the interaction within peer dyads and potentially connect them with formal operations development in the less competent participants. Its significance is related to rare investigations of this subject in the context of formal operations development and to practical implications regarding peer involvement in education process. The sample included 316 students aged 12 and 14. The research had an experimental design: pre-test, intervention and post-test. In the pre-test and the post-test phases students solved the formal operations test BLOT. According to the pre-test results, 47 dyads were formed where less and more competent students jointly solved tasks from BLOT. Their dialogues were coded by 14 dimensions operationalized for this purpose. Correlations between the dialogue dimensions indicate clearly distinguished positive and negative interaction patterns. There are no connections between dialogue dimensions and progress of less competent adolescents on BLOT in the entire sample, but several are found in the subsamples. Arguments exchange seems to be the most encouraging dialogue feature regarding formal operations development, particularly in older students. This confirms relevant research data and the expectations about peers? constructive role in fostering cognitive development. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 179018: Identification, measurement and development of cognitive and emotional competences important for a society oriented towards European integrations]

The article presents the results of an analysis of attitudes of population in seventeenEuropean countries on the importance of components of national identity - cultural, ascriptive and civic - based on the data collected in a survey (INTUNE project). The hypothesis that modernization processes influence the strengthening of the civic component as well as the weakening of ascriptive and cultural components is being checked. Differences in identity formation between countries with specific historical legacies (democratic tradition, dominant religious denomination, and ethnic composition) and structural characteristics (GDP per capita, level of urbanization, migration rate, and tertiary education attainment rate) is being analyzed, as well as the significance of different individual predictors (such as gender, age and university education). In addition to the confirmation of the basic hypothesis, the results suggest that the modernization effects of examined factors (economic, cultural and political) are visible only up to a certain level of development, whereupon they tend to decrease their influence. The strongest influence on the strength of civic components is recorded with an economic factor - GDP per capita. Although civic components proved to be dominant in shaping the national identities across the examined countries, the other two traits - ascriptive and cultural - do not disappear, testifying to the still existing hybrid nature of national identity.

This is an attempt to place the problem of textbook theory into a new frame of reference provided by cultural-historical theory of development, using the idea about cultural-historical mediation of individual development and concept of CST as a basic analytical concepts. The new frame of reference introduces a new language on textbooks, opening a range of new research problems, while dealing with the old ones in a new and more complex way. Textbook is shifted from the usual pedagogic-didactic setting and placed in a more basic and cultural context. The paper is an attempt to bring the concept of cultural tools to a completely operational level, as well as to test the actual power of that concept by identifying CST in textbooks. Furthermore, this paper is an attempt elaborate the forms of social assistance that constitute the zone of proximal development, seen as the characteristics of joint activities of the child and a more competent participant (which is "hidden”, i.e., indirectly present, in this case). Vygotsky never specified the forms of social assistance, but rather gave general prescriptions (Moll, 1990), thus presenting one of the central theoretical and practical tasks for the followers of his ideas