Every year, the Association for Technical Culture of Slovenia launches a chemistry competition for Pregl award and plaques. The competition takes place at a primary school and at a high school. Competitors from the eighth and ninth grade of primary schools compete for the Pregl award, and students from high schools compete for the Pregl plaque. The competition is considered as an important and a successful form of working with pupils as each competition represents a challenge for the competitor, making them more confident and being able to compare their skills with the skills of other competitors. According to studies, pupils like to compete as competitions boost their confidence and motivation for future work. What is more, the competition is an important form of working with gifted pupils. With a qualitative research approach, 780 written examinations of the 51th national chemistry competition for Pregl award in 2017 were analysed. They were obtained from the Association for Technical Culture of Slovenia. The aim of the master's thesis is to gather information, based on the analysis of the examinations, what terms the pupils, the primary school competitors, are familiar with and where they have problems. Based on a thorough analysis of the results from individual tasks of the examination, conclusions can be drawn about what contents the competitors are well-prepared for by their mentors and what contents should be given more attention. The aim of the master's thesis is also to analyse the most commonly occurring mistakes. The results of the analysis show the difficulty of the tasks. The number of pupils who solved the task correctly was given, as was the number of pupils who did not solve the task at all. The most common wrong answers occurred due to: insufficient knowledge of chemical concepts and facts, misunderstanding of the pictures and submicroscopic presentations, negligent reading of instructions, problems in understanding mathematical relations. The competitors were the best at solving multiple-choice tasks, where the highest percentage of the competitors obtained all points. The competitors, however, faced the most problems solving structured tasks, which belong to a higher cognitive level. The determined conclusions can be used as suggestions for the improvement of teaching as well as a feedback to mentors and creators of the tasks about their work.
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