The purpose of the presented study is to present research conducted in the conditions of vocational education in the Slovak Republic, aimed to assess the effectiveness of the use of interactive whiteboards for teaching vocational subjects. The main method of research was the pedagogical experiment; another method used was the questionnaire method. The authors’ research findings give evidence that students obtained significantly better results in acquired knowledge and skills when interactive whiteboards were used for teaching than when taught traditionally. The authors also present recommendations for teaching practice in Slovakia.

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.

The contribution deals with progressively understood instrumental activities during the lessons of music education while using children’s self-made musical instruments and graphical expressions of the music elements. When effectively linked to other music activities, such a concept can be a way to complex personality development of pupils. The are partially presented research results that refer to the observation of the influence of music education drawn up in this way on pupils’ musical abilities in the 2nd and 4th grades of elementary schools.

Students solving mathematical problems on the blackboard are an everyday routine in Slovenian classrooms. On the other hand, it is commonly known that students often consider this situation as threatening. In order to highlight this phenomenon, Slovenian elementary pre-service teachers (N=242) filled out an Internet questionnaire about preferred teaching techniques. Only a third of the participants saw this teaching technique as an effective method for learning. In a pedagogical experiment, three teaching techniques were probed in a problem solving based mathematics course with combinatorial and probability topics. Empirical results showed no significant differences in knowledge according to experimental groups.