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The paper deals with the application of concept mapping in teaching mathematics at the primary level of education (ISCED 1), as well as the experimental verification of its qualitative contribution to the process of education. The authors present results obtained in a sample survey aimed at monitoring possibilities of influencing pupils' relationship to teaching and mastery of mathematics using digital concept maps within the process of pedagogical intervention. The authors tested the degree to which digital concept maps influence changes in the pupils' opinions and attitudes to mathematics (subject popularity, interest in the subject, easiness of understanding, fear and apprehension of mathematics) while explaining and fixating the curriculum of selected mathematics topics in the third grade of a primary school. The results of the experiment did not confirm that teaching supported by concept maps contributes to reducing pupils' negative attitudes towards subjects, particularly in mathematics at the primary level (ISCED 1). Due to the pedagogical intervention of concept mapping, no statistically significant changes occurred in the pupils' attitudes to the observed factors of mathematics. However, the authors have come up with research findings that may be notable in the field of branch didactics of mathematics and digital technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presented paper is devoted to an innovative way of teaching mathematics, specifically the subject combinatorics in high schools. This is because combinatorics is closely connected with the beginnings of informatics and several other scientific disciplines such as graph theory and complexity theory. It is important in solving many practical tasks that require the compilation of an object with certain properties, proves the existence or non-existence of some properties, or specifies the number of objects of certain properties. This paper examines the basic combinatorial structures and presents their use and learning using relations through the Placemat method in teaching process. The effectiveness of the presented innovative way of teaching combinatorics was also verified experimentally at a selected high school in the Slovak Republic. Our experiment has confirmed that teaching combinatorics through relationships among talented children in mathematics is more effective than teaching by a standard algorithmic approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]