Institute for Scientific Research and Artistic Work

The need for an organized form of research work led to the establishment of the Institute for Research and Development Work in 1990, which was later renamed the Institute for Scientific Research and Artistic Work.
The main task of the institute, which works closely with the Commission for Research and Artistic Work, is the coordination and organization of activities in this field. Over the past ten years, there has been an increase in the number of funded research projects, and, consequently, in the number of publications of research results in both national and international periodicals.

At the Faculty of Education, research is primarily conducted in the fields of social sciences and humanities in the form of basic and applied projects, target research projects, and, since 2003, also in the form of research programmes.

The broad spectrum of research areas at the faculty is reflected in the most notable basic and applied projects of the past five years, which have explored:

• the evaluation of descriptive assessment in the first cycle of primary education;
• equity in education systems;
• concepts and strategies of social pedagogical interventions in the field of youth social exclusion;
• education in public schools – designing an educational concept;
• the development of ICT tools for understanding scientific and chemical knowledge and deepening process-related knowledge;
• the integration of information technology into teaching and learning models;
• the development of networks and content in university environments;
• the analysis of trends in the structure of students and graduates in tertiary education.

In the field of target research projects, the following topics have been explored:

• educational policies in the modern European context;
• social climate in schools – educational concepts, prevention of undesirable phenomena, and evaluation of preventive programmes;
• the standardization of the Roma language in Slovenia and the inclusion of Roma culture in education;
• work routines from the perspective of the hidden curriculum in kindergartens and first-grade classrooms;
• implementation of a systemic approach to inclusive schooling in practice;
• inclusive teams in the education of children with special needs;
• a rehabilitation vocabulary;
• didactic aspects of using information and communication technology in the education and learning of children and adolescents with special needs;
• special didactics in education as an element of implementing the nutritional policy strategy of the Republic of Slovenia;
• the development of reading abilities through reading badges.

A number of researchers from the Faculty of Education also collaborate on projects conducted jointly with the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, and in the past also with the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Ljubljana. There is also occasional collaboration with other public research organizations, such as the Educational Research Institute, the Jožef Stefan Institute, the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Research Centre), and the University of Primorska (Faculty of Education, Science and Research Centre).

Researchers from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science are involved in research programmes and projects of the Institute of Mathematics, Physics, and Mechanics

Researchers from the Faculty of Education also participate in two research programmes at the Faculty of Arts – the “Slovenian Language – Basic, Contrastive, and Applied Studies” programme and the “Slovenian Art and the Art of Central Europe and the Adriatic” programme – as well as in two research programmes of the Jožef Stefan Institute: “Biophysics of Polymers, Membranes, Gels, Colloids, and Cells” and “Theory of Nuclei, Elementary Particles, and Fields.”