NATURAL SCIENCE EDUCATION IN A COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL

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Authors: Editorial Board

GAMTAMOKSLINIS UGDYMAS BENDROJO LAVINIMO MOKYKLOJE-2009 XV nacionalinės mokslinės praktinės konferencijos straipsnių rinkinys, Kėdainiai, 2009 m. balandžio mėn. 24–25 d. NATURAL SCIENCE EDUCATION AT A GENERAL SCHOOL-2009 Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Scientific-Practical Conference, Kedainiai, 24–25 April, 2009

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Authors: Zosė Aškinienė, Giedrė Kvietkauskienė

The meaning of teaching and learning in education system is indicated as interacted activity. Success of learning depends on how student is able to work in team where they are prepared for learning all the time and also are able to adapt to the changing environment. The world needs people who can think critically, who can collaborate, take decisions on their own and who are responsible for their actions. Education is an integral process for seeking maturity of personality. Constantly developing society requires perfection from each person specially from a teacher so that knowledge and ability correspond to work market and motivate progress of student and teacher. Natural science is concurrent from education in school. The aim is to introduce students with basic nature laws, to teach to recognize them in the environment. Experimental works help a lot for training students‘ logical skills. During experimental works besides of solidifying knowledge and finding reasons of main laws also skills are being trained. Integration of disciplines help teachers to work more effectively, creatively, correspond to students‘ needs, make equal opportunity to all the students to reach best results. Integration of disciplines is a factor which determine a success of education content individualization. It is important to develop students‘ interest in nature science, to perform tasks on their own, to seek for the information in various sources and structurize it, to work with alternative sources, to qualify. Integration gives an opportunity to analyse problem in different contexts, helps to educate objective and general abilities, requires a new organization of education content and process, motives to reach for balance and collaboration.

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Authors: Renata Bilbokaitė

Motivation is one of the main research areas in education because it helps to learn. External visualization could foster to learn difficult things and to create internal desire to learn. All these types of motivation could be gathered as a general background of learning in science education. According to the research the students like to learn biology and physics. Pupils do not like to learn chemistry because it is very difficult and they do not understand it. In this situation visualization can serve for the aim to foster motivation. It is possible to say that students mostly like to learn biology because lots of phenomena are visible in the nature or they are visualized in the books. The biological objects are clear comparing them with chemistry or physics. The other science disciplines are more difficult that biology because students must ode and encode visual and verbal information; also they must be able to use their knowledge in the practice. As the solution of this problem there in the education process could be used computer based visualization. It could foster students’ motivation to learn difficult phenomena. Also, computer based visualization could help to remember thing and to hold information in the long term memory. Visualization could educate visual thinking and to help perceiving information.

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Authors: Ana Diadiūra, Renata Miliauskaitė, Danuta Paškevič, Laimutė Salickaitė-Bunikienė, Andrej Rožkov

Today secondary education schools face increasingly higher standards. One of the most important tasks is to set the level of education, determine the ability level of students, their interests and wishes, desire towards future profession, provide with opportunity to try different ways of studying. Here Information Technologies is what we have to use at our lessons as a part of a lesson delivering the necessary message from other subjects. IT help to make a lesson more interesting and informative. It helps to find new ways of studying, reveal hidden talents and learn to study individually and in a team either. There have already been used some special programs at chemistry lessons, such as Moodle, Atotour, Hot Potatoes and Crocodile Chemistry. Recently dr. Laimutė Salickaitė-Bunikienė from Vilnius University Chemistry Department kindly suggested to participate in the international Socrates Comenius 2.1 project what made us stronger in our decision to use all those programs mentioned above at chemistry lessons and integrate some other subjects into our lessons. Special attention was paid to the information from archives of some Vilnius museums. Our chemistry teachers undertook EVOLUTION program courses then and started planning the contents of their lesson with that educational program. For example, at the lesson about metals a lot of additional materials about metal’s chemical and physical features, its production and use in industry, pollution problems, etc. were used. Our students had a very good chance to visit the Restoration Centre at Vilnius University Chemistry Department with its head Pranas Gudynas. There were presented some samples of metals collected by professor Kazis Daukšas. The students interviewed dr. Laimutė Salickaitė–Bunikienė about metal restoration, and what chemicals are used to restore different kinds of metals. After that we searched for some extra information in the Internet and made some tests for self–assessment on acquainted material. It was easy to join all sorts of information that students had got from University museum, however, for some students it was really hard to learn the subject. One of the reasons is that our adult students cannot do full–time at school and have to spend most of the time at work and with their families. Some students find it too difficult for them to work with the program. Also, proper tools and approaches should be used to create a successful virtual lesson. Students of 11 m, o, p, 12a, b classes actively participated in the excursions to Vilnius Technical Museum accurately examined the first exhibits of calculating machines produced in Lithuania, took many pictures and some videos. Much useful information was found on the website designed to present the calculation technical opportunities in the history of the „Sigma“ company – http://www.sigma–vsmg–skb.org Learning to work with EVOLUTION program and present useful information for the lesson gave the students an opportunity for active learning activity and information processing skill’s development. Also, working with this program required good computer skills. The most difficult for the students to understand was: program tree, tree components locking and copying, photographs and picture reduction with Paint and Irfan View programs. Together with students we had to learn and get used to operate with the main tools of the program and create an interactive lesson. EVOLUTION program let you do this: - Together with students prepare interactive virtual lessons so that the students would not be passive participants during the lesson but actively participate in the activity; - During the lesson students could learn main theoretical materials, which are richly illustrated by visual materials; sound and video materials make lesson more attractive and visual; - Students can study at their convenient time and pace, individually learn the program topics, and check their knowledge completing some tests and practical tasks. Running the project „Development of Computer Equipment in Lithuania“ following stages were used – preparation, data collection, tasks formation, project completing, summarising. The lesson can be saved in a data base and used by individually studying students as a useful way in distant education. The International Socrates Comenius 2.1 project „Museumscouts“ promotes new ways of teaching and education in general. With the help of „EVOLUTION“ program a virtual lesson was created, were a lot of in-formation from museum archives was used

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Authors: Danuta Golnis

The UN General Assembly proclaimed the year 2007–2009 as International Year of Planet Earth in order to turn people’s attention to global changes of the nature and to make planet Earth safer. One of the goals of teachers who teach natural sciences is to make this subject more attractive, clear and easy to understand. The aim of the research is to find out how deep is students’ knowledge about Planet Earth and how students (forms 7–8) understand and explain natural phenomena. The respondents were given tasks and questions about Planet Earth and natural phenomena. Conclusions. Summarizing the results of the carried out research the following conclusions can be drawn: • The quality of teaching natural sciences is still considered to be relevant. It is difficult for students to explain everyday phenomena which they observe. So it means that the teaching material is not related to real life. • The knowledge of students’ about natural phenomena is not thorough Such and similar researches is one of the ways to evaluate students’ competences, to find out their strengths and weaknesses and to help students to observe the level of their knowledge. Traditional teaching methods, presentation of the new material and individual students’ work don’t guarantee that all students will gain the basic knowledge. Methods and teaching material should be chosen according to students’ abilities.

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Authors: Rita Kareivienė, Auksė Kavaliauskienė, Gražina Masandavičienė

Project activity at school is the powerful tool of modern process of teaching/learning. Project „Travel of a droplet of water“ offers many more interdisciplinary environmentally educational activities for educators and learners. The goal of Project is to facilitate and promote awareness, appreciation, knowledge and stewardship of water resources through water–related activities that are hands–on, easy to use etc. Project is focusing on the teacher as a facilitator for learning. This modern approach steers away from the traditional method of teachers passing down knowledge to their students. The main project idea was implementation different educational activities in action (learning by doing). It is emphasized that project activity should be as continuous process, as such activity is long–term educational process at school.

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Authors: Regina Kaušienė

Projects in sciences are very important. Students learn how to search, select, and evaluate new in-formation in science, environment, and new technologies. Teachers have to spend much time in leading of them. It is easier to do this job using distance learning courses. How it is possible? I use my Moodle course of Organic Chemistry for 11’Th form for project „Petroleum and Alternative Sources of Energy“ a few years. There is special forum for discussing themes and problems, which student are ready to solve. First steps doing this project they have to find interesting item for themselves, think about hypothesis, research plan. Distance learning course is good place to give calendar of works, evaluation criteria for students. I use Rubric’s for evaluations, which are very popular in America. It is difficult to take a look on all works in lessons. If there are many students it is even impossible. Consulting is effective than teacher have enough time to study what students had done. This is possible if students send works by email or put them in distance learning course. Finally students get advices for their projects at much shorter time, because they don’t need time to wait for chemistry lesson. They can ask for help by email or in discussion board. Students can help each other too. Schedule of project helps to plan time and better prepare for presenting their works. In summary all the work is more effective and better organized thanks to distance learning course.

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Authors: Vincentas Lamanauskas

In recent years, science education has been frequently accepted as an inseparable and extremely important part of comprehensive schooling. On the other hand, science education is very often interrelated with technology and humanitarian education which means it is necessary to develop general rather than specific teaching of sciences in school so that every student should receive science and technology education adequate for our time. All of us should remember that science is the quest for knowledge, not the knowledge itself (D. Roller, cited by Duschl, R. A. 1990). Natural science education can be characterised by a variety of content provisions, forms and methods of teaching/learning, practical activities. All these are expected to make the process more effective to widen intellectual knowledge and skills of students, to provide conditions for students activities, to develop students reasoning skills, to influence their aesthetical outlooks etc. The natural science education is very actual today in both developing and developed countries. Qualitative natural science education is necessary for each person living in the modern world. Various researches show, that natural sciences have lost former charm in the developed countries. On the contrary, youth in developing countries have positive interest to natural sciences. An assessment of the researched results reveals a clear objection. The findings of students’ achievements at national level announced that the priorities of teaching sciences in basic school were gradually changing as orientation towards knowledge was declining and achievements in abilities to perceive sciences were getting better. However, otherwise research showed that the learners’ achievements in the field of sciences still were not remarkable enough and a part of those did not manage to conduct even the simplest experiments. It is obvious, that the role of teachers in the science education process is invaluably important. If the student shows interest to natural sciences first of all it is a merit of the teacher. On the other hand, a duty of scientists, managers of education is to create all necessary conditions for effective work of the teacher. Also adequately to pay for the important and hard work. Another main point is that it is very important to transfer the information to students, but it is much more important to learn them to think. Usually students are not capable to acquire a teaching material in appropriate level. In total 442 scientific and methodical publications were analysed in research. All articles published in collections of 15 conferences during 1995–2009 are analysed. Having summarized the results of the carried out research the following conclusions can be drawn: • the changing and development of natural science education in the comprehensive schools in Lithuania is sufficiently quick, but not effective enough; • the analysis of publications in all collections displays that the main topic of interests is science education process. The area of environmental and ecological education is on the second position. That reflects the popularity and urgency of these two areas; • the pressing of the subjects of science education stimulates the educators to work with creative power, to look for the new teaching/learning methods and strategies; • the majority of publications are prepared by the Lithuanian authors – scientists and teachers, other experts in the field of science education. It is obvious that all 15th collections of scientific and methodical papers will be of great use for all – both teachers–practicians (in the theoretical sense of the competence), and scientists (in the sense of the connections with the secondary school), and to those, who works in the field of development of the natural science education. The topics of articles very wide.

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Authors: Laima Railienė

ICT in Republic‘s secondary schools are closely connected with the development of the society, common informative culture, students‘ outlook widening, etc. Modern geograpfy is variable and integral sphere of perception. Nowadays it is different to imagine life without geography. Geography knowledge is of practical type, because it is very important for all of us to know the world where we live in, be able to orientate in the space, social environment, etc. ICT, in this case the Internet, helps to give knowledge, widen outlook. The article shows how it helps to learn new material, systemize already known things and review them.

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Authors: Violeta Šlekienė, Loreta Ragulienė

Information and communication technologies (ICT) become one of popular fumiest object of discussion of late years. Technologies of computers make influence to many live ranges, especially for system of education. Computers are use wide in process of physics education. One possibility of computer’s appliance is electronic educational implements. This paper deals with the electronic educational implement opportunities to use for education. The electronic educational implement „Electromagnetic Phenomena“ is presented and discussed. It is adapted for the studies of physics. Educational material, as theory, tasks, tests, experiments, visualized phenomena, laboratory works are presented. This is good educational mean which helps to realize appointed educational goals for teachers while teaching about Electromagnetic Phenomena in the lessons of physics for pupils of 9th grades. This implement can be used for various educational goals: explanation of new topics, as additional demo–mean, mean of the phenomena visualization, for revision, fixation and control of the knowledge. Implement of computer learning makes ease work of teacher; helps for learner assimilate introduced information. This educational computer implement gives biggest facility self teaching. This implement is simple to use and therefore teachers or pupils knowing not so much about Informational Technologies should not be embarrassed.

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Authors: Zinaida Žvinklienė

The environmental education of pre-school children is based on their personal experience and their knowledge. Good conditions should be created for environmental education: for observation, experiments, games. Under the guidance of their personal experience children find the answers to the questions and make conclusions. The adults give examples of the correct behavior with the environment, they encourage children to notice the negative influence to the environment , find the reasons and solve the problems. Children observe, they arrange and clear-up the environment. Different actions take place, children take party in traditional holidays, environmental activities. Environmental knowledge is integrated into the children’s activities. We have seminars and projects and share the experience with the teachers of the district, representatives of the community.

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Authors: Janis Gedrovics, Dagnija Cedere

In the 1990s Latvia started experiencing essential changes in the whole education system, including what regards the subject of chemistry. In 1993 the University of Latvia established the Centre of Chemistry Didactics, with the main aim to train chemistry teachers in accordance with the new educational paradigm. The centre offered courses for teachers’ further education and created new methodological materials. Students taking their MSc in chemistry didactics also took part in working out new teaching-learning methods and researching the teaching-learning processes. A significant role in the development of chemistry education has been played by the project „Science, maths and technologies subjects - development of the curricula and the further education of teachers”, which was carried out with the support from European Social Foundation (2005–2008). Currently chemistry education focuses on increasing pupils’ activity and cognitive interest as well as on the development of their researching and problem solving skills. School chemistry is more closely linked to practical life. A survey has been carried out comparing pupils’ (9th and 11th formers’) answers, given in 1998 and 2008, to basic questions about chemical transformations. The comparison reveals that during these ten years no significant change has taken place. Pupils still display quite poor understanding of the basic issues in chemistry. This allows for the conclusion that the majority of pupils are still learning chemistry without understanding the subject properly, but only to get a good mark.

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Authors: Irina Zhikina, Inna Portyanskaya

In this article one of the variations of transiton from subject integration to out-of-school project-analyse activity of students is being examined .A concrete example is given as the „A lyrical point of view on physical phenomena’s ” project , the goal of which is the foundation of a multimedia composition of phenomena’s or processes and conceptions which should be presented from the point of view of different educational disciplines. Originally designed to motivate weaker students to study exact sciences, the project caused a huge interest among students and schools with different specialization therefore evolved into a city project within the past few years. At the moment the multimedia database is successfully growing.

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Authors: Eleonora Melnik, Irina Schekoldina

Surrounding environment with its subjects, processes and phenomena is perceived by a child holistically. Understanding of the world is developed on the basis of his or her personal experience and knowledge in accordance with the law of natural and attitude of society to the world. Regular and systematic knowledge is acquired by children during their school years. In primary school knowledge is based on emotional peculiarities of children at the age of 9-10. This is the age when child’s subject features start to form, they continue to grow and develop during the whole life giving a person autonomy and social significance. Child’s skill to recognize different subjects, phenomena of natural and social character of the world around and to find existing connections in this environment indicates his or her understanding of the complete picture of real world. Personal identity as subject of activity and communication in the environment is important for children of primary-school age because it helps to understand and accept the world around, realize its content and define significance for themselves. Conclusions: 1. One of the positive results of the research conducted is that children define „place as space” with which a child connects his or her appearance in this world. The category of place is used as a tool indicating the character of „borders” between a person and physical environment and defining the person’s status of „Openness-restraint” concerning the world around. However, places different in scale (city, republic and country) were clearly described as place of birth. 2. Place does not contain subject characteristic. 3. Place does not contain description of natural and social phenomena. 4. All participants of the research denied the suggestion to make a story.

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Authors: Margarita Shishonok, Eugene Makarenko, Vladimir Pankov

The article has information-analytical character and is devoted to an actual problem of natural science education: the admission of students-chemists in classical university. The demand for chemists is great today. The stuff of entrants-chemists, their knowledge level, the competition for chemical faculty, the lowest passing score determine the quality and quantity of the future specialists who are potential workers at European countries since the integration processes. For the first time entrance campaign in Belarus was carried out without examinations at faculty, and entrants were taken in just on the basis of the centralized testing results. The analytical handling of the entrance campaign results has been executed in the form of diagrams. As a result, the total admission on budgetary and paid training forms on „Chemistry“ specialty came to 154 persons. The lowest passing score – 255. The competition for one budgetary study vacancy is equal to 1,74. The majority of entrants was taken in „Research-and-production activity” and „Pharmaceutical activity” qualifying directions. There has been taken twice less persons in „Research and educational activity” direction, as it has turned out, than in pharmaceutical one. The minimal entrants’ number was taken in „Preservation of the environment“ qualifying direction.

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Authors: Editorial Board

GAMTAMOKSLINIS UGDYMAS BENDROJO LAVINIMO MOKYKLOJE - 2009 XV nacionalinės mokslinės-praktinės konferencijos straipsnių rinkinys, Kėdainiai,2009 m. balandžio mėn. 24–25 d. *** NATURAL SCIENCE EDUCATION AT A GENERAL SCHOOL - 2008 Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Scientific-Practical Conference, Kedainiai, 24-25 April, 2009