6  JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 2/2014
Editorial
Editorial
The present issue of the Journal of Contemporary Educational Studies, which 
is entirely thematic, addresses the question of quality in education. It is a very 
topical and wide-ranging field that has been increasingly put into the foreground of 
thinking and discussions in recent years—both in formal and non-formal education 
and learning at all levels, from preschool to tertiary and adult education. In the 
last several decades, practically all of the “big narratives” of education have been 
related, directly or at least indirectly, to either structural or process quality in 
education. They have a crucial influence on expert considerations and educational 
policies, whether in relation to pressing for the reforms of school and educational 
systems, their connection with the labor market, the introduction of one austerity 
measure after another, the competence-based design of curriculum documents, 
the didactic transformation of conducting various educational programs along 
the whole vertical or the extremely prominent international assessments of 
knowledge, competences or literacy, whose results have a substantial impact on 
national educational policies and, consequently, on the quality of education. How 
can the concept of quality in education be understood, how can it be assessed and 
evaluated, and, finally, how can it be ensured that everyone participating in an 
educational program is provided with a good-quality education? This, of course, is 
a topic that cannot be exhausted with the limited (although high-quality) selection 
of scientific articles. Nevertheless, the contributions in front of you approach the 
topic systematically and clearly enough, and sometimes also entirely empirically.
The issue of the journal is opened by Ljubica Marjanovič Umek’s article 
The structural quality of preschools: How it influences process quality and children’s 
achievements. The author studies both process and structural preschool quality, 
defining process quality as a comprehensive system that includes different 
dimensions and aspects related to material and human resources. She writes 
that these conditions enable children to develop in physical, movement, cognitive, 
linguistic, social, and emotional areas, and they also allow for learning as well as 
the realization of preschool educational goals. She also emphasizes that a high 
quality of preschool education at the process level is related to suitable working 
conditions, which are defined through structural quality indicators. The author 
highlights three conditions: the size of the classroom (the number of children in the 
classroom), the adult/child ratio in the classroom, and the size of the indoor play 
area per child. These indicators are increasingly included in various international 
comparative analyses of preschools, which demonstrate that Slovenian preschools 
are broadly comparable to preschools in the European countries with highly 
developed preschool education, but not evenly in all structural indicators or all 
children’s ages. Marjanovič Umek also underlines the fact that preschool classrooms 
demonstrate great variety regarding their process quality, although they function 

Editorial 7
within comparable structural quality. According to the author, this leads to the 
conclusion that structural quality is a necessary, but not the sufficient condition 
for the maintenance of high quality at the process level.
Process quality has an important influence on students’ pre-reading competences 
in the first primary-school educational period. This is the topic examined by the 
author of the second article. In Assessment of prereading competence, Ivanka Bider 
Petelin shows that, according to research, various competences acquired in the 
preschool period (i.e., in the pre-reading period) are closely related to subsequent 
reading achievements. She emphasizes that learning to read is a long-lasting 
process, starting with the development of pre-reading competences. It gradually 
leads to independent reading for learning, which also means that students must 
develop different competences well before reading—recognizing letters, knowing 
that speech is made up of different phonemes, understanding that letters represent 
phonemes, using working memory, and distinguishing phonemes. Bider Petelin 
presents the findings of her research study, which employed foreign and Slovenian 
tests that include variables related to reading. She adapted, extended, abridged, 
and updated them in order to test a sample of children from five to seven years of 
age on the development of pre-reading competences. The author concluded that, 
when tested on pre-reading competences, children were best at combining syllables 
into words and worst at using working memory (the test required them to repeat 
that last words from two to three sets of sentences). She also established a number 
of differences between boys and girls. On average, the boys were more successful 
on tests that measured the analysis of syllables, short-term auditory memory 
for digits, short-term auditory memory for sentences, short-term visual-spatial 
memory, rapid automatic naming, and recalling words when given a superordinate. 
On the other hand, the girls were statistically significantly more successful on 
tests that measured rhyme recognition, syllable synthesis, the recognition of the 
first phoneme, phonetic discrimination, phoneme analysis, removing a phoneme/
syllable, short-term auditory memory when given visual support, short-term 
visual memory, and recalling words when given a phoneme.
The next author, Vesna Podgornik, presents the results of her empirical 
study on self-evaluation among educators in primary and secondary schools. She 
starts her article Quality assessment and assurance in Slovenian schools through 
self-evaluation research by defining the concepts evaluation and self-evaluation. 
She defines evaluation as a process of ascertaining to what degree and how we 
have achieved our planned goals by collecting evidence and reaching findings 
on the quality of programs, projects, services, organizations, and individuals’ 
work. She describes self-evaluation as a reflection on the important aspects 
of educational work, leading to the assessment of the current work done by an 
educational institution, or as planned, systematic, structured, and constant 
attention that schools pay to the quality of their work. In her study, the author 
analyzed the attitudes of educators in Slovenian primary and secondary schools 
toward undertaking self-evaluation research. The majority of her respondents think 
that self-evaluation is important or very important to the occupation they have. 
Their views are importantly shaped by certain predictors, such as the educators’ 

8  JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 2/2014
attitudes toward the necessity of continuous professional development, their interest 
in research work and knowledge of how to carry out self-evaluation, as well as 
school managements’ encouragement of teachers to carry out self-evaluation. In 
the last section of her article, Podgornik concludes that it would be important to 
introduce university students (future educators) to research and self-evaluation 
and to gaining research experiences during their undergraduate studies as well 
as during seminars, workshops, and lectures as part of their continuing in-service 
training.
Aleksandra Grašič and Katja Jeznik discuss Quality assurance and 
quality development in vocational education and training. The authors summarize 
the history of quality assurance in vocational education and training (VET) at 
European and national levels. They present the existing national reports on quality 
in VET and stress the currently topical method of assuring quality in educational 
institutions, the so-called peer-review method. They define the method as a form 
of external evaluation with the aim of supporting the reviewed institution in its 
quality assurance and development efforts. The authors emphasize that relevant 
literature defines the peer-review method as a form of external evaluation; however, 
the self-evaluation of the provider of education also has an important role in the 
peer review procedure. Participating in peer review is voluntary, and during the 
preparatory phase each school chooses which area it wishes to have reviewed. 
Grašič and Jeznik maintain that quality development should not strive only for the 
assessment of objectively testable and measurable learning outcomes, since they 
believe this would mean the marginalization of the development of social values, 
key competences, and the factors in the learning process that contribute to the 
development of the student’s mature personality. Special attention should also be 
devoted to the students coming from less encouraging environments, immigrants, 
and to students whose previous negative experiences in the educational system 
often make them unsuccessful in the classical school form of education.
The penultimate contribution to this issue considers the quality of university 
education. The article Students’ attitudes on the quality of university teaching was 
written by two authors from Croatia, Snježana Dubovicki and Ines Banjari. 
The authors state that the quality of university education is not only a research 
topic in the fields closely related to education; rather, it is also becoming part of 
interdisciplinary research and teaching internationally. According to the authors, 
ensuring the quality of university education is becoming a global trend and a 
priority of contemporary society. They present the results of their empirical research 
study on students’ attitudes toward the quality of university teaching, the criteria 
that students use for the assessment, what elements affect the quality, and the 
differences among students from different faculties. The results they gathered 
demonstrate that the students’ views of the conditions for ensuring and improving 
the quality of university teaching are most affected by the following factors: 
whether or not the program was a student’s first choice, the ways in which study 
contents are presented, the frequency of the student’s participation in courses, 
and positive social and emotional climates. They point out that the research has 
raised numerous additional questions that need careful further attention.

Editorial 9
The thematic issue is closed by Tanja Možina’s article Quality definitions 
and structural quality indicators in adult education. The author begins by stating 
that understanding the concept of quality and its nature is important, since it is 
our conceptual starting point that defines what quality strategies we will develop, 
what quality models and indicators we will use, and what instruments we will 
need to measure quality. She also stresses that quality can never be fully defined 
in either its absolute or potential. Thus, any definition we offer can only be partial 
and we will never be able to define the absolute quality criterion. In other words, 
the quality of educational inputs, processes, results, and outcomes can only be 
inferred indirectly—from the measurable characteristics of the input, process, 
and output components of education. This very relativity of understanding the 
concept of quality, writes Možina, leads to the conclusion that the answers to the 
questions about what makes good-quality education and what quality we desire 
in adult education must be sought in democratic debates. These need to include 
different views and interests, which the author believes leads to considering 
different aspects of quality and enables us to approach quality in adult education 
comprehensively.
Damijan Štefanc, Ph.D.,
Thematic Editor