Pupils in Slovenia get to know human evolution for the first time in biology classes in the 9th grade of primary school. Those who continue their education at secondary vocational or professional schools will probably never deal with it again. In the past, a lot of research has been carried out on the subject of a human evolution, which has identified the good knowledge of pupils, but with typical problems. In contrast, the attitude towards biology is less researched. Most of the research has involved fields of biology and not biology in general and has come to conclusion that our pupils have a positive attitude towards biology. The aim of this master's thesis was to find out what is the knowledge of secondary school pupils in the Ljubljana region, what their attitude to biology is and how these two components are connected to each other. Our aim was to test how the knowledge and attitude of pupils is changing according to gender, school and grade. We included 350 pupils in our research. Most of them were from grammar schools and a smaller share was from secondary vocational/professional schools. We used an anonymous knowledge test and a questionnaire. Data analysis has shown that pupils do not have sufficient knowledge about human evolution. Grammar school pupils possessed better knowledge compared to pupils from secondary vocational/professional school. Boys showed better knowledge compared to girls. There are no fundamental differences between pupils of different grades. In attitude towards biology, secondary school pupils have an average opinion. There are no fundamental differences knowledge about human evolution between students of different schools. However, there are differences in attitude towards biology between genders and students of different grades. The second-grade pupils have the most positive attitude, followed by the pupils of the first and then the third grade. Girls agreed with a half of the claims of the questionnaire and boys with another half. The research showed a positive correlation between the attitude towards biology, internal motivation and the assessment of self-efficacy on the one hand and the knowledge about human evolution on the other hand. On the basis of these findings, we prepared the preparation for the lesson about human evolution.
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