Today teachers teach pupils who are highly computer literate and technologically aware. We must be aware that the outside world is increasingly involving into school classrooms, especially with new communication and information resources. These circumstances should be taken into account in teaching if teachers want to be accepted, understood and stimulate pupils the joy of science. Advanced didactic approaches are focused on pupils and their activity. The didactics of leadership, researching and discoverying should replace the didactics of frontal teaching and interpretation. In the master's thesis, a quantitative and qualitative research approach has been used to find out which are the most common methods of teaching physical, chemical and biological contents during the science and technology lessons in the 4th and 5th grades of elementary school. We focused on practical methods and the way of their use in teaching science and technology in the 4th and 5th grade of primary school. Furthermore, we examined how teachers plan to check and evaluate practical work during science and technology lessons in the mentioned grades of primary school. Despite the fact that we live in a time marked by great discoveries in the field of science and technology, it is known that interest in natural science subjects is decreasing. Our research has shown that teachers do not consider the guidelines of modern teaching and rarely apply the use of practical methods in teaching in the 4th and 5th grade. They do not pay enough attention to laboratory-experimental work. The gained results indicate the need to changes the planning of science and technology lessons in 4th and 5th grade. We suggest teachers to include more practical work during school lessons, which, according to the results of numerous researches could contribute to better motivation of pupils to learn science.
|