In class, it is important to plan activities, which allow students quality gaining of content as well as procedural knowledge. It is important, that the teacher carries out as much practical work as possible, since it encourages students to think more, conclude and link their thoughts, make arguments and overall gain lots of experience and virtues crucial for the life ahead of them.
Practical work has a positive impact on students’ knowledge, point of view and virtues and can be more efficient than the classic classes. However, some teachers confirm to this kind of teaching, while others due to various reasons do not. Even in curriculums such as Nature Study and Natural Sciences and Technology it is written, that students should gain knowledge, adopt positive stances and develop skills based on direct experience. For teaching biology based contents, direct contact with different organisms is anticipated, too. Since there are several materials for performing practical science work available for teachers, I decided to test the effectiveness of practical exercise on knowledge and point of view of students in first and second educational period.
I executed the empirical part with the help of 98 such students, with students from third to fifth year of elementary school to be exact. I included two classes from each. In the first one, the students were taught about mould and research in the classic way. In the second class, they did practical work with the research question “What grows on bread?”. They had to do an experiment on their own and figure out which and how many species of mould will grow on the bread.
The results show that students in all three classes have good opinion towards practical work and experimenting, however they do not desire to become investigators. Prior knowledge of all students was different and we can suggest, that this shows in some of their claims. The results also show some adequately general and theoretical knowledge about mould. Still, we can argue that their general knowledge outweighs the theoretical. The majority of students find mould repulsive, but they still want to learn about it. Our main point of interest was if the practical work affects the way they see it and their interest in exploration more than the classic school work. We wanted to obtain the possible differences in the knowledge gained by students based on the way we taught them. We found out, that there was very little difference, but still we can say that there is some more knowledge and will to investigate among the students who had done practical work. Hence, we can conclude that practical work has more of a positive effect on the interest and knowledge of students than the classic school work.
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