The effect of active teaching in the primary school's ecological content

Sa？etak The aim of the research was to determine how active students' involvement influences the quality of acquired knowledge, as well as students' motivation and attitudes towards active teaching. The survey was conducted on a sample of 64 students in three sixth grade classes of elementary school. The students were divided into experimental and control group. The experimental group was learning about the topic of deciduous forest, taking active learning in the group, independent work and work in pairs through different tasks and in the field work. The control group got classical frontal lecturing. Three written tests, examining knowledge and a survey for students were used as data collection tools. Written examination was carried out prior to the research and after each sequence of active learning. The survey of students' motivation and attitudes took part at the end of the research. The results show increased students' motivation, as well as the success in learning, especially when the activities involved field work. Each active learning technique, that allowed students applying independent research steps and work outside of the classroom, was positively evaluated. The logarithmic form of regression better explains the learner's achievement, but the linear model still shows satisfactory reliability and reduces the importance of a few individual performance results so it is better to use it to show overall image performance in knowledge testing. The research results confirm the need for using active learning, with an emphasis on field work in the nature, as well as various teaching methods that encourage student activity. In this way, students' satisfaction, as well as their learning success, would be significantly increased