Human evolution is an interesting but also a difficult theme for pupils as well as teachers. Pupils deal with it at the end of class 9, in a couple of lessons. To give pupils better knowledge about human evolution, teachers should be more qualified. In other words, teachers should be introduced to wrong ideas pupils have in their minds and try to eliminate them during lessons. Relations are formed all our lives and have influence on individual's attitudes towards a certain subject or a person. Different factors have an impact on these attitudes. Some of them are connected to the family environment, the second to individual's characteristics, such as self-reliance, motivation and achievements, the third ones depend on teachers, peers and class climate. The goal of our research is to get insight into the knowledge of class 8 and class 9 pupils about human evolution. Furthermore, we were also interested in attitude pupils have towards biology lessons and biology as discipline. We tested whether there were obvious differences in knowledge concerning human evolution and attitude towards biology among pupils of different sex, class and school. We wanted to see if there was a connection between attitude towards biology and human evolution knowledge. The research was carried out at two primary schools from different regions, Dolenjska and Štajerska. The sample includes 260 pupils from classes 8 and 9. The pupils used Likert Scale to evaluate their level of agreement with 28 statements from the human evolution test and with 53 statements from the questionnaire which tested their attitude towards biology. Test results show that pupils had sufficient knowledge about human evolution for they together achieved 60,7 % success. Most problems they had with placing events in time and space. Class 9 pupils possessed much more knowledge than class 8 pupils. But there were no significant differences among boys and girls and among pupils from different schools concerning human evolution knowledge. Pupils expressed positive attitude towards biology lessons and biology as discipline. We found no differences among class 8 and class 9 pupils concerning attitude towards biology. But on the other hand, differences appeared in attitude towards biology among pupils of different sex (girls have more positive attitude) and among pupils from different schools (school 2 pupils expressed more positive attitude towards biology). Our findings show that there is a connected between human evolution knowledge and attitude towards biology. In other words, pupils with better human evolution knowledge had more positive attitude towards biology.
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