Natural science and technology is a school subject that carries an important role with the upbringing, education and the overall formation of a young person. The curriculum for environmental education (2011) contains aims directed towards discovering weather phenomena and characteristics of matter, which are systematically upgraded in the curriculum for natural science and technology (2011). Students have a fairly superficial knowledge of these everyday subject matters. In the fifth grade, the knowledge regarding wind is supplemented with the understanding of the cause of wind, means of measuring air pressure, wind speed and wind directions, knowing the means of harnessing wind power etc. The subject matter of the water cycle revises the students' understanding of water going through different states of matter and adds to that the knowledge of the processes connected to the water cycle in the nature and understanding the reasons why the water flows towards the sea.
One of the more modern, constructive and less established teaching methods being used are educational games. They are more typically used with young learners, i.e. the learners of the first three years of primary school, and are less often used by teachers with groups of older learners. This thesis investigates to what extent educational board games are able to achieve the learning objectives connected to the topics of wind and water cycle in the fifth grade of primary school. Due to the possibility of confusion in the construction of cognitive scheme during individual work, the research also focused on the role of synthesis of result in this way of teaching and how it affects the permanence of knowledge. Two educational board games on the topic of wind and water cycle were designed for this purpose.
The empirical part was directed towards quantitative and qualitative research. Within three fifth-grade classes of a countryside primary school, learners were randomly grouped into sub-groups that stayed the same during the research. To ensure the relevance of the acquired data, a pre-test was first conducted to gather information about their prior knowledge, while later the learners also took a post-test and a follow-up test. These achievements were cross-referenced with the pre-tests and were the basis for the conclusions of this research. During the lessons, students filled in a worksheet with questions related to the topic. Two variations of worksheets were developed and they differed in the formulation of the synthesis of results.
It can be clearly established from the data gathered from the tests that all the learners made advancing steps in their knowledge and that they were able to reach the learning objectives for the subject matters of wind and water cycle. However, there were statistically significant differences in the tests between the group provided with the synthesis of results and the group that did not have them. This means that the gathered data speak to the positive influence of using the synthesis of results. The group whose handouts included the synthesis of result was more successful at achieving learning objectives and at solving the follow up test. This is crucial information for the guidelines for this teaching method. Due to the limited number of participants and a smaller scale of studied topics, the results of this research cannot be generalised.
The result helped give insight into the knowledge acquired while using educational board games and worksheets with the synthesis of results. The findings point toward further research, e.g. on a larger scale, other contents, different form of syntheses of results, studies of the learner’s perspective on this style of learning etc.
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