The main question that all teachers ask themselves is undoubtedly how, in what way to teach, to present subject’s matter to students in the best possible way. At the same time we want students to understand it and remember it as permanently as possible, and we are also trying to influence on their personality and develop students into self-initiative, responsible and social beings. We know many different forms of work and learning approaches that help us with achieving that. These are, for example, project-based learning, problem-based teaching, exploratory learning, role play, collaborative learning, experiential learning, learning with creative movement and so on. The subject Science and Technology (hereinafter NIT) has its basis in the nature around us and with the content itself offers starting points for research, experiential learning, problem-based teaching, etc. At the same time, the challenge in subject Science and Technology are the already created (wrong) ideas of students about science concepts, which is why we must pay even more attention to the appropriate use of approaches to teach NIT, through which students develop correct ideas.
In the master's thesis we want to determine the impact of teaching NIT with creative movement on the knowledge of students, the sustainability of their knowledge, opinion about the subject NIT, opinion about creative movement and well-being in relation to different learning approaches. The research included the 5th graders of a selected primary school and a teacher in the school year 2020/21. Pupils were taught in different ways; traditionally, with creative movement and at a distance.
The purpose of the empirical work was to investigate how the learning approach creative movement affects the well-being of students compared to traditional and distance learning lessons, whether the learning approach contributes to greater progress in knowledge and sustainability of knowledge, whether the creative movement affects opinion on the subject NIT and what is the general opinion of students about movement and creative movement. We conducted research based on different research approaches, for which we designed four different lesson plans based on three different teaching approaches. We always taught the same fifth grade, and we also distributed survey questionnaires and knowledge tests to the students of the selected grade. With the first, we collected data on different opinions of students, and with the second, we determined the progress in knowledge and the sustainability of knowledge. We also conducted a semi-structured interview with the teacher, which served to further reinforce the results.
From the results of empirical research, we found that the well-being of students in the subject NIT is always (very) good, regardless of the chosen approach to teaching. We also found that the learning approach creative movement contributes to greater progress of students in knowledge, but not to the sustainability of knowledge, which is questionable in distance learning due to the complexity of the subject. Students' opinions about NIT before and after the research do not change, as students had positive attitudes towards the subject before the research. Even the opinion about movement does not change, in general students like movement very much, and the results indicate a positive opinion about the learning approach creative movement. We also found that students ’knowledge progress is greater if the lesson is rated as easier.
The results support the inclusion of a learning approach to the creative movement in science lessons and call into question distance learning, which has proven to be the least effective in research.
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