DEGREE OF PUPILS’ CERTAINTY IN SOLVING TASKS FOCUSED ON BASIC LOGICAL CONNECTIONS

The research described in this article was conducted at lower secondary schools in the Czech Republic and was attended by 200 pupils from the last grade of lower secondary schools. The text itself can be divided into three parts. The first part outlines the possibility of analyzing pupils’ ability to work with basic logical connections, such as a conjunction, disjunction, implication, work with inverted sentence or negation of a statement. In the second part individual results are analyzed in relation to the two following factors. The first is the motivation for learning and the second the education of parents. The main focus is on the third part where answers to individual items of the test that concentrates on basic logical connections are considered in relation to the pupils’ feedback. The issue of the measurement of pupils’ logical thinking has already been addressed by considerable amount of authors. None of them, however, considered the assessment of the degree of correctness certainty, so-called certainty judgements which refer to evaluation of one’s own performance, functions as an internal feedback and can give instruction to resume learning activity. The paper mentions several indicators of certainty judgements (Nelson, 1996; Burson, Larrick, & Klayman, 2006) in relation to the pupils’ success in solving tasks with basic logical connections. It is very interesting that despite the fact that it is a demanding topic the pupils are very confident while solving the tests.