Learning with modern teaching approaches involves a wide range of activities that facilitate memorisation, interest, activity, and cooperation between pupils, mainly through didactic games. Such games provide an environment in which pupils feel safe, can focus only on a particular activity and are thus as effective as possible.
These activities require pupils to be active, which has an impact on their holistic development, i.e. the development of a wide range of areas. Since the topic of "electricity" is not usually associated with a wide range of teaching approaches in the second trimester of primary school, we decided to look into this topic. Our primary focus will be on basic experimental work, which is one modern teaching approach.
One of the methods we wanted to include in our research is the NTC method, named after the Nikola Tesla Centre, which combines a variety of modern teaching approaches. The activities of the method are basically more oriented towards working with pre-school children, but we also want to introduce them in the upper grades of the classroom level.
As part of the research for the Master's thesis, we prepared activities for a technical day on the topic Electricity in the 4th grade of primary school. We designed and adapted some familiar activities and implemented them in the context of a technical day in a selected primary school. The aim of the research was to find out whether the pupils have experience of modern teaching approaches, how they feel about these lessons, how they react to this kind of work and how their knowledge progresses when taught using modern approaches.
13 students took part in the study. Data were collected through tests, interviews and observation. All pupils were involved in all stages of the research and in all activities. Before and after the technical day, they took a knowledge test to see how their knowledge progressed. We also prepared semi-structured interview questionnaires for them to check their well-being, interests and experience with modern teaching approaches. The technical day was fully audio and video recorded, as we further analysed the whole day and the students' reactions using observation protocols.
Through the survey, we identified the suitability of the planned modern teaching approaches in our sample, as the students showed progress in their knowledge of electricity, showed visible signs of enjoyment in the activities, felt good, liked the cooperative learning, were exposed to new learning methods and their reactions were positive. Our experience shows that modern teaching approaches create a stimulating environment for learning. They have been shown to require more teacher activity (preparation, supervision, timing and discipline), but the effectiveness is considerable, which cannot be generalised to the primary crowd due to lack of sample size.
The activities developed and evaluated will help teachers of Year 4 to teach this topic and the findings will encourage them to prepare their lessons in this way. The
research conducted shows that this type of teaching has a positive impact on classroom climate, individual well-being, memory, pupils' development, teacher-pupil relationships and pupils themselves.
We strive to provide pupils with the kind of knowledge and understanding that they will be able to use in their lives, and that will be as lasting and high quality as possible. This was the purpose of the research.
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