INQUIRY BASED SCIENCE EDUCATION – SELECTED FACTOR ANALYSIS

Concept of Inquiry Based Science Education belongs among activating teaching methods and is based on constructivist approaches to education. In science education, the first signs of similar methods emerge since the 60s, particularly as a response to the failure of traditional teaching practices that were no longer sufficient to accommodate the ever-growing amount of knowledge through simply learning by heart. Inquiry Based Science Education aspires to get closer to real scientific process – within school environment. Pupils thus do not act in the role of passive recipients of information as they often become in the frontal approach to teaching, but they develop their own research through their active participation. Pupils often play the role of real scientists, provide scientific problems, analyze them and synthesize, verify and evaluate proposed hypothesis. Nevertheless, adopting the role of researchers, pupils, as well as the teacher and the school may face situations in which they can run into difficulties similar to those real scientists and scientific institutions find themselves in. The presented analysis deals with the evaluation of opinions on Inquiry Based Science Education in more than 700 primary school teachers. More than twenty selected factors were monitored for which hypotheses were established and subsequently evaluated. The monitored factors included: duration of teachers' experience, availability of teaching aids, the possibility of manipulating objects, the frequency of experimentation, pupils' cooperation in groups, direct observations during walks and excursions, work with sources of information, recording the results in e. g. pupil's portfolio. The analysis offers a series of partial results associated with observed factors, but overall survey results confirm the complexity of Inquiry Based Science Education with regard to teachers, as well as their crucial role in its implementation. Correlation between the utilization rate of the principles of Inquiry Based Science Education and the duration of the respondents’ teaching experience was mainly demonstrated.