o:29745 Confessional instruction or religious education: attitudes of female students at the Teacher Education Faculties in Serbia en Abstract: This paper presents an empirically study on the attitudes of female university students at all Teacher Education Faculties in Serbia (TEFS). For the purposes of this study, a survey was prepared to be completed by students online, and virtual exponential non-discriminative snowball sampling was applied. The independent variables were religion, major subjects, year of study, age, the completion of secondary schooling, whether an optional subject was studied during previous schooling, and whether female students were employed. The dependent variables were the respondents’ attitudes to religious instruction and civic education. The sample included 372 students from all TEFS, and the research was conducted in the period from 15 May to 8 June 2022. The data were processed with the aid of nonparametric statistics. The results showed that religion did not contribute to differences in students’ attitudes and opinions regarding the method of performing religious instruction and civic education, but that some other factors contributed to it, such as previous experience with these subjects and whether the respondent had completed secondary schooling. These results may be interpreted in the light of the weaknesses of the confessional model, that is, the lack of knowledge regarding the basic paradigms of other confessions, which is of great importance for countries such as Serbia which have numerous national minorities and religious communities. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/2/160 Keywords: religious education; confessional instruction; civic education; university students; Serbia 1552099 10.3390/rel14020160 1552101 2077-1444 2023-05-23T15:25:58.858Z 44 yes 46 Урош Шуваковић Универзитет у Београду Учитељски факултет 0000-0002-2141-8698 Јелена Петровић Универзитет одбране у Београду Војна академија person 0000-0002-5344-5770 Ивко Николић Универзитет у Београду Учитељски факултет person 0000-0002-1899-4424 application/pdf 1809522 https://phaidrabg.bg.ac.rs/o:29745 no yes 1 70 92000001 11A42 Religions 14 1 14 MDPI [Commercial Publisher] 2023 https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/2/160