doc. PhDr. Zuzana Jančík Petrová, Ph.D.
Department of School EducationIn 2001, she completed her master’s degree in Elementary School Teaching at the Faculty of Education, Comenius University in Bratislava. She then continued her doctoral studies in Pedagogy, which she completed in 2005. Since 2006, she has been working at the Faculty of Education, Trnava University in Trnava, currently holding the position of Associate Professor in Pedagogy. At the Faculty of Education, Trnava University in Trnava, she completed her rigorous continuation in Preschool Pedagogy in 2007 and subsequently her habilitation in Pedagogy, which she completed in 2015. Since 2018, she has been working at the Faculty of Humanities, Tomas Bata University in Zlín as an Associate Professor.
Her research interests include the relationship between language, speech, and cognition in the context of school education. Specifically, she focuses on the theoretical and practical aspects of developing language literacy in preschool and early school-age children. She also engages with these topics as a member of the research team at the Institute for Research in Social Communication of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV, v. v. i.). In this field, she has been the principal investigator or co-investigator of several projects funded by the APVV, VEGA, and KEGA grants from the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic. Previously, she participated in research activities within the international COST Action projects 1404 The Evolution of Reading in the Digital Age (2014–2019) and 1410 The Digital Literacy and Multimodal Practices of Young Children (2014–2019), where she focused on early literacy development in preschool children, including the impact of digital technologies on the reading process. She also participated in the research project 86016 ELIT – The Empirical Study of Literature Training Network, which addressed questions regarding changes in reading in the digital age with support from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions within the H2020 program.
She publishes in both domestic and international scientific journals and participates in international conferences in early childhood education and literacy development. In the past, she contributed to the development of the national curriculum for kindergartens in Slovakia (State Educational Program for Pre-primary Education in Kindergartens), where she prepared the conception for developing children’s spoken and written language (educational area Language and Communication).