Abstract:

The ongoing curricular reform in Slovak primary education creates a favorable but methodologically demanding context for verifying innovative approaches that develop pupils’ transversal competences, reflective judgment, dialogical participation, and school climate. Philosophy for Children (P4C) appears particularly relevant because its community-of-inquiry method systematically cultivates questioning, reasoning, perspective-taking, value reflection, and cooperative meaning-making. At the same time, Slovak educational practice still lacks robust empirical evidence showing whether, and under what conditions, P4C can improve outcomes that are now explicitly foregrounded by the reform: practical application of knowledge, argumentation, metacognition, emotional self-regulation, prosociality, and ethically informed participation. This paper therefore explains an empirical study design tailored to Slovak primary schools. The study is positioned within the new State Educational Programme and the educational area Man and Society, including its ethical-personal component, and responds to the reform emphasis on competence-oriented education, school-level curricular autonomy, and implementation support for teachers. The article proposes a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental, multi-site design combining pretest-posttest comparison, classroom-process monitoring, teacher implementation logs, and qualitative pupil and teacher data. The design targets critical, creative, caring, and collaborative thinking, classroom climate, moral reasoning, argumentation quality, metacognitive reflection, and selected socio-emotional indicators. The paper argues that empirical verification is now not only academically desirable but systemically necessary: without credible evidence, P4C will remain an attractive but under-validated innovation in Slovak school reform. The proposed study offers a realistic framework for generating evidence that is usable for curriculum implementation, teacher education, and future methodological guidance. The P4C empirical research verification is supported by the KEGA 010UMB-4/2025 project financed by Ministry of Education in Slovakia.

Keywords:

Philosophy for Children, P4C, empirical verification, primary education, Slovakia, curricular reform, Man and Society, ethical-personal component, school climate, metacognition.