Self-reflection teaching diary

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Soňa Lovašová

If we were to conduct a study on the popularity of subjects among social work students, the subjects of Research Methodology and Statistics would likely rank low on the list. It is precisely the lack of popularity of research methodology among students that led to the preparation of this textbook. The stylistic approach of this text was chosen with the intention of introducing the fundamentals of methodology to students encountering it for the first time, without alienating methodologists. The text primarily serves as a teaching aid for the course "Exercise in Research Methodology" and the seminars "Bachelor Thesis Seminar" and "Master's Thesis Seminar." Throughout the entire textbook, examples and case studies are interwoven and visually highlighted. The text endeavors to address the fundamental question that is key to motivating and understanding the essence of research methodology: why is research necessary for social workers? The aim of the textbook is to facilitate students' preparation for the Research Methodology course and to enhance their understanding of the basics of research methodology.

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Lucia Tóthová - Katarína Šiňanská - Eva Žiaková

Here is the translation of the provided text into English: A guide to oncological treatment was created at a time when the importance of health became even more emphasized, becoming a kind of mega-value for the new modern "pandemic" human. The use of the term "pandemic" person arose, of course, in connection with the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic worldwide, but primarily because other dangerous long-term diseases that threaten contemporary humans are somehow being pushed into the background.

The severity of such diseases (including cancer) does not diminish just because attention has shifted to something more acute. It is very important to realize this and not fall under the illusion that if we overcome an acute danger, then automatically improve conditions for chronic diseases as well. We believe it's quite the opposite; prolonged stress and social negative factors constantly affecting us—among which undoubtedly includes pandemic situations—worsen not only psychological but also somatic states.

The guide to oncological treatment aims precisely at highlighting those psychological and social factors that negatively "support" cancer development in any form and can positively influence treatment and coping with illness. The guide offers opportunities for social engagement with groups of people undergoing similar oncological treatments, allowing them to share psychologically as well as professionally similar situations with those facing similar problems in treatment. The authors hope that this guidebook will reach those who will become more self-sufficient in overcoming such a formidable enemy as cancer.

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Iveta Bónová

The foundations of the presented work were developed alongside the emerging research on child language in Slovakia. An enthusiastic team of individuals from several scientific fields—psychology (Marína Mikulajová), speech therapy (Svetlana Kapalková), and linguistics (Daniela Slančová, Jana Kesselová, Zuzana Ondráčková, Stanislava Zajacová, Iveta Bónová)—met regularly, discussed, and sought ways to mobilize efforts to achieve their set goals: conducting research on the language of intact (healthily developing) children based on actual longitudinal observation.

I am very pleased and grateful to have been part of the team at the beginning of systematic research in the field of child language acquisition in Slovakia. As a member of this team and a co-researcher on several projects in this area, I had the opportunity to participate in research on child language, which is no longer "on the fringes" of scientific interest. It has become a serious, exact study supported by quantitative and qualitative data, conducted systematically "at an excellent scientific level" (Průcha, 2011, p. 14).

The research itself was naturally preceded by data collection. The technologies of the late 20th century enabled the replacement of the outdated diary recording method with what is now the most commonly applied approach to material collection—audio-visual recordings. The synthesis of analyzed data collected over time, its explanation, generalization, and integration into a broader interdisciplinary research context is all the more interesting and beneficial as it contributes to speech therapy practice. Thanks to the results of the latest research, intervention possibilities in speech therapy are expanding, and methods for (early) diagnosis and stimulation are being developed and refined.

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Božena Velebná

The following material has been created during the two years of teaching English for Chemists at the Faculty of Science of the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University and is therefore designed to meet the needs of this course. The main motivation was the lack of appropriate materials, especially as the groups generally comprise students with a very diverse level of English. This diversity therefore became the main criterion determining both the form and the content of this text.

In the ten units that provide material for a one semester course, the emphasis is put on teaching the students vocabulary and terminology, which is introduced via authentic texts, depending on the topic of each unit. Students are encouraged to learn the meaning of new words in context. Grammar is included too, with the aim of demonstrating and explaining grammatical rules by means of examples taken directly from the texts. For the more advanced students, grammatical exercises in this material can serve for revision while the beginners might need more supplementary materials.

I hope that this material, the preparation of which has been a challenging as well as enjoyable experience will be useful for future teachers and the students of this course.

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Jozef Bavoľár - Ján Ferjenčík - Pavol Kačmár

Učebnica pokročilých štatistických metód v behaviorálnych s sociálnych vedách je určená študentom týchto vied, ako aj tým, ktorí sa vo svojej výskumnej praxi stretávajú s riešením stredne náročných výskumných otázok, pre zvládnutie ktorých nie je postačujúca znalosť základných štatistických metód. Učebnica na nich stavia, jej jadro však tvoria štatistické metódy, ktoré sa sústredia najmä na zachytenie multivariačných vzťahov. V úvodnej kapitole sú uvedené základné princípy testovania nulových hypotéz ako základ uvádzaných metód, pričom sú zohľadňované najnovšie trendy zamerané na otvorenosť a replikovateľnosť výskumov. Každá z nasledujúcich kapitol je venovaná vybranej metóde, prípadne skupine metód. V úvodných kapitolách sú to lineárna a logistická regresia, na ktoré nadväzuje sledovanie mediačných a moderačných efektov. Druhý veľký celok tvoria metódy skupinového porovnávania, kde sú vysvetlené rôzne alternatívy analýzy rozptylu (jednovchodná, viacvchodná, pre nezávislé výbery, opakovaná, zmiešaná), ich neparametrické alternatívy, multivariačná analýza rozptylu a analýza kovariancie. V záverečných kapitolách sú najprv prezentované dve metódy zachytávajúce podobnosti či vzťahy medzi objektmi (zhluková analýza, faktorová analýza), následne sú uvádzané princípy modelovania štrukturálnymi rovnicami. V každej kapitole je po vysvetlení účelu metódy a jej základných princípov demonštrované jej použitie na konkrétnom príklade, ponúkané sú aj návody pre výpočet v troch štatistických programoch – SPSS, Jamovi a JASP. Snahou autorov je poskytnúť učebnicu, kde záujemcovia aj bez hlbšieho matematického základu budú schopní porozumieť prezentovaným štatistickým postupom, zvoliť si pre nich ten najvhodnejší, a následne ho aj použiť na svojich dátach.

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Lucia Tóthová

Počet ľudí so zdravotným znevýhodnením neustále rastie, čo predstavuje výzvu aj pre oblasť sociálnej práce. Tá zohráva kľúčovú úlohu v podpore týchto osôb a hľadaní efektívnych spôsobov napĺňania ich potrieb.

Vysokoškolská učebnica vznikla v rámci riešenia projektu KEGA č. 018UPJŠ-4/2024 s názvom „PhotoVoice ako inovatívna metóda advokácie sociálnych potrieb ľudí so sluchovým postihnutím“. Je prvou časťou viacdielneho cyklu, ktorý sa venuje rôznym aspektom tejto problematiky. Učebnica analyzuje historické a teoretické východiská, terminológiu a modely zdravotného znevýhodnenia. Venuje sa špecifikám vybraných druhov zmyslového znevýhodnenia. Osobitná pozornosť sa upriamuje na sociálne potreby týchto osôb a advokácii v sociálnej práci, pričom zdôraznený je význam aktívneho zapojenia ľudí so zdravotným znevýhodnením do riešenia vlastných životných situácií.

Okrem poskytovania odborných poznatkov môže učebnica slúžiť aj ako podnet na hlbšiu reflexiu vlastného prístupu k ľuďom so zdravotným znevýhodnením a na rozvoj citlivého prístupu k ľuďom so zdravotným znevýhodnením. Navyše, učebnica obsahuje vybrané prvky tzv. jasnej tlače, čím podporuje jej prístupnosť.

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Renáta Orosová - Michal Novocký - Katarína Petríková

An integral part of the process of becoming a teacher is the mentoring of student teachers by mentor teachers, serving as guidance and support for future teachers. Developing mentoring skills and fostering reflective mentoring practices are means of enhancing the practical training of student teachers, their professional development, and improving the quality of their future educational practice.

The foundation of the mentoring relationship between the mentor teacher as a mentor and the student teacher as a mentee is not to evaluate the student, but to analyse their learning and teaching and contemplate ways to enhance these processes. The university textbook represents a creative textual tool focused on innovations in strategies for supporting the development of mentoring abilities in mentors and mentees during professional practical training. This university textbook, intended for student teachers in the role of mentees and mentor teachers in the role of mentors, systematizes the theoretical foundations of mentoring, provides guidance and directives for mentoring in professional practical training. Furthermore, it offers the university teacher, in the role of supervising the student's teaching practice, an overview of techniques and methods pertaining to the mentoring relationship between mentor and mentee. It is applicable as a university textbook for student teachers, students pursuing supplementary pedagogical studies or advanced studies, as well as for mentor teachers in primary and secondary schools, and university educators involved in professional practical training.

Its English version provides opportunities for utilization during study stays of student teachers abroad and for foreign students in Slovakia.

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Vladimír Lichner

The presented university textbook presents a basic overview of statistical theory and practice intended for students of social work, including examples of their use in specific studies. This text deals with the first part of statistical practice, namely descriptive analysis, which we perceive as a basic condition for the processing of any empirical research and is also important in grasping typical statistical principles and concepts.

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Magdaléna Hovanová

The monograph is devoted to social support, set in the adolescent's environment. Social support can also be described as relational support from the environment in which the individual lives, and thus increases his resistance to stress and the desire to overcome life's failures and crises. It is for this reason that social support was also defined in the context of social-ecological theory. An innovation in the relationship with social support was the "Push-pull" theory, oriented to the individual's motivation.

The defining anchoring of social support was built on its most famous theories. However, the greatest attention was focused on the possibilities of measuring social support, because its multidimensional measurement is necessary to determine the mechanism by which it works. The monograph therefore offered the author's validation processing and verification of psychometric properties of two separate methodologies Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) - (Zimet, Dahlem, Zimet, Farley 1988) and Social Support Survey (MOS) - (Sherbourne, Stewart 1991).

The monograph results in two validation-verified separate methodologies for measuring types and sources of social support, which are reliable for use in a group of Slovak adolescents (MOS-SK and MSPSS-SK).

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Dušan Šlosár

The monograph "Risk as a Social Category in Adolescence" by Dušan Šlosár was created as part of the VEGA project No. 1-0285/18, which focuses on risky behavior among adolescents as clients of social work due to their loneliness. The monograph explores the issue of risk in a theoretical context and integrates risk as a component of social relationships, contacts, and information exchange. From this theoretical foundation, it defines risk within helping professions. Assessing the level of risk is left to leading managers; however, it currently affects those helping professionals who work with specific client groups, and thus their involvement in assessing the level of risk cannot be overlooked.

The monograph pays special attention to risky behavior among adolescents and discusses the most serious forms of such behavior, ranging from suicidality to crime, substance abuse (both material and non-material), and issues related to sexuality. The conclusion of the monograph consists of three empirical studies that address the topic of risky behavior among adolescents.

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SLOVAK IN DIALOGUES FOR BEGINNERS – INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL STUDENTS - Workbook

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Ingrid Madárová - Veronika Pálová - Lucia Tóthová

Audio attachments - format RAR

The audio-exercise workbook “Pán doktor, rozumiete po slovensky?”is a follow-up to the textbook “Pán doktor, hovoríte po slovensky?” (Madárová et al.)and is intended for international students of Slovak as a foreign language in the medical environment.

This workbook provides the students with an opportunity to practise and enhance mostly their listening skills and pronunciation through various short dialogues between doctors and patients in the Slovak language. Dialogues contain the vocabulary used in the textbook Pán doktor, hovoríte po slovensky?.  Students are encouraged to build their confidence in speaking Slovak by practising these dialogues in the new workbook.

The audio-exercise workbook is comprised of 16 units. Each unit offers short dialogues and recordings

A number of dialogues enable its wide use for self-studying while the most frequent phrases related primarily to body parts, signs and symptoms of illnesses, diseases or various medical conditions are practised in different contexts in a variety of exercises.

Original illustrations enable students to understand dialogues more easily and the correct answers of the exercises and the scripts of the recordings can be found in the Answer key at the end of the workbook.

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Lucia Tóthová - Eva Žiaková

The current time is fast, hasty, with strongly asserted women's emancipation, absorbed by information and communication technologies that overcome distances but create them at the same time. The lifestyle of humans is changing, many diseases are on the rise, and cancer is becoming a "trend of the present". Claims on man, and especially on women, are now too great. Women perform multiple roles and perform many tasks. They become caregiving mothers, understanding and surrendered wives, workers with professionalism and flexibility, and idols the myth of beauty too. Due to the overlapping of the traditional gender division of labor, the life of women takes place on several levels. Their work day does not end when they leave the job, but they continue to care for their household and their own family. Besides all, they strive to fulfill not only personal expectations, but also the expectations of the family, social environment and society, reject failure and strive for perfectionism.

In our lives, situations that affect and burden us more or less appear. Even though we can not in control everything and everyone, we are able to control situations that are of direct concern to us. In life, we encounter problems in employment, financial problems, illness or death of near. As well as negative, also positive situations affect us. Each responds to each situation different ways.

Monograph is one of the ways in which we aim to draw attention to the so "C-coping style" as a maladaptive way of managing the burden that is typical of oncological ill patients. It is one of the possible concepts that affect the manifestation of breast cancer. Based on this, we have focused on the used coping strategies and we consider the life events to be a significant burden in the lives of cancer patients. The research is aimed at synthesizing the life events and the coping strategies used to coping them, conceived as a risk behavior of patients with breast cancer. As the coping of the burden can be different between men and women, the monograph is intended predominantly for women, to which we have also focused in realized research. They can be patients with oncological diagnosis, but also women who want to prevent this disease by use effective coping life events. We also believe that the monograph will enrich everyone who is interested in the same target group.

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Miroslava Köverová - Simona Ďurbisová  (eds.)

Proceedings present abstracts of contributions registered for the scientific conference Work and Organizational Psychology 2023. Conference date and venue: 8-9 June 2023, Department of Psychology, Faculty od Arts, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice.

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Ľubov Vladyková

The present monograph titled Evolutionary Ethics: Selected Issues and Challenges discusses a range of problems, theoretical concepts, and beliefs from the perspective of evolutionary ethics. The term evolution has become one of the central terms in contemporary science and philosophy.

In social sciences in general, and in socio-biology and evolutionary psychology in particular, evolution has had great impact on our understanding of the genesis of culture. Evolutionary theories play a similar role within the theory of consciousness and of the mind (evolutionary epistemology). The interrelation between our evolutionary past and our sense of good and evil is also a subject of heightened interest in ethics; it has in fact become one of its challenges. The concept of evolution challenges the way we create thought patterns through which we understand, or hope to understand, ourselves and the world around us.

This monograph represents a general summary of selected issues in evolutionary ethics, touching upon various aspects of current research into evolutionary ethics and the related domains of evolution, science, ethics, and morals. Evolutionary ethics has become a project which presupposes that in order to understand the essence and basis of morals one must turn to the process of evolution of thought, and to the theories put forth by evolutionists, specifically evolutionary biologists.

The structure of this monograph, as well as its potential usefulness for research and education clearly show that the analysis of the problems discussed here has significant implications for domains far removed from the purely theoretical parts of moral philosophy or biology. The advantage of such discourse is that it enables the implementation of evolutionary ethics in social and ethical issues of public interest (for example Sex Literacy, Sex Education), and this should be recognised and welcome.

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Štefan Jusko

Selected Chapters in Epistemology" is a work resulting from the author's multi-year research and also represents a fulfillment of the requirements from pedagogical practice in this subject. The chapters, presented in this synthesized form, have not been published before, and I am convinced that precisely in this form they can gain higher value and greater real impact on our philosophy students.

The individual chapters focus on the problem of knowledge today, primarily on the problem of criticizing metaphysics and questions related to creating post-metaphysical thinking. It is no coincidence that Friedrich Nietzsche is a common denominator for the presented texts; he is a philosopher who has fundamentally influenced and continues to influence current philosophical discussions and intellectual movements. The chapters are written to lead our students or other readers toward reflection, i.e., critical thinking, personal growth, and professional independence.

To what extent I have succeeded in fulfilling my intentions and goals remains for the reader to decide.

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Henrich Hrehor - Martin Pekár (eds.)

(Košice, Kraków, Miskolc, Opava) : From the Middle Ages to the End of the 18th Century.

Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference, Košice, June 28–29, 2012

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