Problems of Education in the 21st Century

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Authors: Editorial Board

Cover page, Vol. 71, 2016, PEC

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Authors: Costin Pribeanu

The platforms supporting social networking activities on the Internet are applications for the creation, sharing and exchange of user-generated content that manifests in various forms. Users can freely express their ideas and opinions, and have opportunities to launch and participate in collaborative projects and virtual communities. Facebook (FB) is a social networking website featuring an explosive growth in the last years and an increased popularity among university students. For example, the number of Facebook users in Romania was 8.5 million in June 2016 (Facebrands.Ro, 2015) out of which 33% are young people of 15-24 years old. Recent research on the Facebook use shows that Romanian university students have large Facebook networks and spend a lot of minutes per day (Pribeanu & Lamanauskas, 2016).

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Authors: Suleyman Goksoy

The research aims to determine the leadership levels the deputy principals feel, their perceptions of their personal features and the environment of the organization in which they demonstrate leadership role. In the research, case study method from qualitative research methods was used. The data were collected by one of the qualitative data collection tools; interviewing. The data were analysed with descriptive analysis techniques. The following results were obtained in the research: Deputy Principals consider themselves as leaders in terms of personal features and behaviours. The competencies of deputy principals in terms of leadership are; technical competencies, interpersonal competencies, conceptual and cognitive competencies. The aspects that deputy principals think that they need to improve and enhance are; human relations, determinedness, consistency, sensitivity, talkativeness and hurriedness. According to research results, it is found that deputy principals are of the opinion that schools have the centralist, inflexible, disaggregated, officialised and non-creative features of the organizational structure in terms of institution, culture, legislation and management.

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Authors: Magdalena Kugiejko

Content and methods of education implemented in schools are changing rapidly. One of the reasons fuelling these changes is implementation of such programs like the Lifelong Learning Program (LLP) Erasmus Plus, which motto „Learning for life” is gaining more and more followers. For the purpose of proving this theory, the researcher presents below the profiles of two primary schools (Primary School in Krosno and CEIP Villa Romana in Spain), which participate in this international cultural and educational exchange. The researcher paid special attention to the assumptions of the LLP project, tourism mobility and achievements resulting from the international cooperation between the educational institutions. To present the problem, the researcher used one of the qualitative research methods for case studies. It determined the careful analysis of the individual interviews as well as participating observation of the program coordinators and teachers’ behavior showed how much potential lies in the cooperation of teachers and pupils participating in such educational exchanges. The undertaken research (including interviews with the staff and observation of the projects management) and its analysis confirmed the hypothesis that every type of school, regardless of its location (city or countryside) can benefit from participation in an international exchange. The main limiting factor, noticeable especially in the schools located in rural areas, is the mentality and fear from participation in an international program, challenging the language skills of the staff and resulting in more administrative work. However, the success of the Erasmus Plus program is best measured by the fact that after initial participating, both village schools continued the project in the following years.

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Authors: Şenol Şen

This research examined the relations among students’ learning strategies (elaboration, organization, critical thinking and metacognitive learning strategies), self-efficacy beliefs, and effort regulation. The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) was used to measure students’ learning strategies, self-efficacy beliefs, and effort regulation. A total of 227 high school students participated in the research. Confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis were performed to examine the relations among the variables of the research. Results revealed that students’ metacognitive learning strategies and self-efficacy beliefs statistically and significantly predicted their effort regulation. In addition, the students’ self-efficacy beliefs directly affected deep cognitive learning strategies and effort regulation but indirectly affected metacognitive learning strategies. Furthermore, 88.6 % of the variance in effort regulation was explained by metacognitive learning strategies and self-efficacy beliefs.