The development of pupils´ Science process skills at secondary school

Abstract

[EN] As an integral part of physics education, we consider the development of pupils´ SPS. The aim of our survey is the development of selected pupils´ SPS - predicting and formulating hypotheses on the age level 14- 16 years. As an endeavour to meet such a goal, we prepared and included specific activities, which requires to make predictions or formulate hypotheses, and also we included physics experiments planned by students themselves in physics education. The process of preparation of specific activities for the development of selected SPS is described below. Reason for the inclusion of physics experiment planned by students themselves in physics education is that formulating hypotheses or prediction is one of the planning stages of a physics experiment. In the second part of our contribution, we present our experiences with utilization of specially designed activities and with the implementation physics experiments planned by students themselves. In the last part, we present a Hypotheses quality scale, a tool for the comparison of students´ hypotheses, to compare how they formulate hypotheses in the first, second and third activity in a series. We also made a comparison between hypotheses formulated in activities prepared by the teacher and hypotheses formulated for experiments planned by pupils themselves.