The subject Environmental studies was first introduced during curricula reform of compulsory education in 1996 as a substitute for the subject Science and Society that existed in The Programme of Life and Work in Elementary Schools (1984). The purpose of the subject Environmental studies, that is taught in the first cycle of the nine-year elementary schools, is to present the complexity, diversity and interweaving of factors that operate in human's natural and social environment. Therefore contents from various scientific fields, i.e. natural, technical and social sciences are involved in it.   It continues and directs spontaneous children's investigation of our world, while it also promotes discovering complexity and interrelationships in phenomena and processes in natural and social environment. Knowledge that children acquire through direct experiences in the environment or through media is extended and deepened in the classroom (Učni načrt, 1998).  Such learning can be realised through different teaching strategies and approaches, commonly denominated as open learning. Its main characteristic is that teachers do not stick traditionally to learning aims, contents and methods but they rather adapt them to pupils' interests and abilities in order to create conditions for pupils' collaboration and for considering their previous experiences (Blažič et al., 2003)

As the research (Hus et al., 2003, Ivanuš Grmek, Hus, 2006) indicates that teachers of Environmental studies use different teaching approaches in all thematic areas of the subject (mostly project work), we were interested about the possible impact of individual teaching approaches on quantity and quality of pupils' knowledge and on their interest for learning about specific contents of Environmental studies. During the research process we focused on two thematic areas in Environmental studies, namely Me and the Nature and What am I Able to do.

On the one hand, traditional ways of teaching place teachers in the monopolistic position, while on the other  hand, pupils get less opportunities for individual engagement and cannot play an active role in the process of their learning. Thus we decided to carry out project work as an opportunity to overcome these defects during Environmental studies in the 3^rd grade of the elementary school.  We designed a didactic experiment in order to test the effectiveness of project work from pupils' knowledge perspective in Environmental studies as well as their interest in learning natural and social studies.  

In this article we will focus only on the presentation of effectiveness of project work from pupils' knowledge perspective. Thus we wanted to find the impact of project work from pupils' knowledge perspective in Environmental studies. Considering Bloom's taxonomy of objectives for cognitive domain, we investigated the impact of project work on: reproduction (knowledge of facts, data, notions, definitions and theories), understanding and application of knowledge. We will present the impact of project work on application of knowledge in our article.

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