Motivation is an important condition to win, hold and develop pupil’s activity in the teaching process. That is why we consider it useful to inform students of teaching professions about the possibilities how to utilize particular elements of education for motivation of their future pupils.

The paper gives an account of research on the impact of progressively understood instrumental activities on the motivation of pupils during the lessons of music education in the 2nd and 4th grades elementary school. We present the results of research performed through a pedagogical experiment that included various methods of pupil motivation. As a part of it we used children’s self-making of simple musical instruments and playing them while also using graphical depicting of music elements in an organic conjunction with further music activities.

This article characterizes motivation for learning and school anxiety among pupils of the last two grades of primary school and junior high school students. The research method is the “I and My School” test by E. Zwierzyńska and A. Matuszewski. The research pinpoints low motivation for learning and an average level of anxiety among the tested adolescents. The gender does not diversify the motivation level. Girls are characterized by a higher level of school anxiety than boys. The motivation level rises in junior high school and the level of anxiety decreases. Good students have an equally low motivation level as poor ones but at the same time good students have a higher level of school anxiety. The following factors influence the low level of motivation among the tested students: general reluctance towards learning, low interest as far as the lesson is concerned and the teacher’s behaviour.

The paper presents research findings in the field of motivation for the study of social work at PF MBU from the graduates’ perspective as an output of a partial task within the Faculty project “Assessment of the quality of the study and employment opportunities for the social work graduates of PF MBU”, which was researched in the period of 2005–2006 by the members of the Department of Social Work at the Pedagogical Faculty of Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica.

Value is an interdisciplinary term studied by several fields of study. Psychology is one of them; it researches into values mostly in terms of needs, interests and human motivation. Our paper deals with the definition of the terms value, value system and value preferences of high school students. We present some results of broader research that was supposed to find out what is the value orientation of high school students as well as their preferences of terminal and instrumental values.

The aim of this research is to study high-school pupils’ (9th–11th grades, 14/15 to 17/18 years old) self-regulated learning skills. The tool of the research is a questionnaire developed for this purpose; the research sample is a group of randomly selected high-school pupils from schools over the north-west part of Romania. The results show that only one third of the respondents think that mathematics is useful in everyday life and their future career; a very low percentage of the pupils set goals for learning mathematics; about a quarter of the respondents analyze correctly the task and have a correct task difficulty perception; the pupils’ self-efficacy and self-control is low, but they have a high self-judgement level. Most of the pupils are aware that there is a strong relation between the time they spend with mathematics and their results. There is a strong correlation between the pupils’ mathematical results and their interest to study mathematics, their task analysis and self-control skills, and their task difficulty perception.

The article examines the impact of microlearning technology on students’ motivation. The experimental (microlearning technology) and control (traditional learning) groups compared the study results. Statistical analysis was conducted to determine the answers to the motivation scale and to identify the significance of differences in students’ answers in the control and experimental groups. The Scheffe method was used to determine the source of differences in the responses of the study groups. The analysis of the study shows that microlearning technology has better results due to greater student engagement and learning motivation than traditional learning.

The paper deals with the issue of achievement motivation in adolescents and with the research into the level of the structure of this motivation. The LMI method was used to carry out a side study of a randomly selected sample of students at secondary commercial schools, branch management. Achievement motivation is used as a concept to explain the differences in individual behaviour in various parts of life. Our investigation was focused on finding out the total and partial scores in achievement motivation, including the description of each dimension both in boys and girls