The study deals with the development of pupils' intellectual assumptions and cognitive functions. The optimization strategy in the subject research are educational activities that are applied in primary education. The subject of the investigation is the identification of the impact of educational activities on the level of pupils' intellectual assumptions, operationalized at the level of pupils' general knowledge (factual, conceptual, procedural). The research design is based on a pedagogical experiment with pupils in the transition period. According the results, pupils who have been applied educational activities achieve a higher level of intellectual prerequisites at start of the primary school.

The subject of the study is preconceptions of pre-primary education children about the selected phenomenon of “learning”. We were interested in whether there are differences in children’s identified preconceptions regarding intellectual abilities. Identifying such a difference could be one indicator of giftedness that could also be useful in early educational diagnostics. The research design was mixed; data were obtained through semi-structured flexible micro-interviews made individually with 39 children. Conclusions of the research investigation point to a difference in cognitive and structural components of children’s identified preconceptions and a difference in terms of their intellectual abilities while confirming the diagnostic potential of children’s preconceptions to reveal giftedness also in children of pre-school age.