Abstract:

One of the serious problems in contemporary education that concerns many educators is the low academic performance of our students. It can be the result of various factors, and one of them is the lack of interest among students in school and in the subjects being taught. The teacher's task is to create conditions for teaching with the main purpose of leading students towards attaining the attributes of independent thinking, activity, and critical evaluation of phenomena and facts. To acquire not only basic but also advanced knowledge, we must employ student centered activating teaching methods. In this contribution, we present the implementation of didactic games created by us into the Chemistry teaching process at primary school level.

There are many observations from the pedagogical-didactic field that agree on the fact that didactic games are justified in contemporary education in the 21st century. To verify the effectiveness, we chose a standard approach. We divided the students into a control group and an experimental group. In the control group, traditional teaching methods were used, while in the experimental group, didactic games were added. At the beginning, we monitored both groups using the SRQ–Academic questionnaire (Self-regulation Questionnaire - Academic), which assesses students' reasons for decision-making in fulfilling their school obligations. We administered the questionnaire twice before and after the active use of didactic games in Chemistry classes. The second line of assessment involved knowledge tests. Both groups completed five identical knowledge tests, and the results were subsequently compared.

The experimentally obtained results from the SRQ–Academic questionnaire showed that after implementing teaching units with the integration of didactic games, the experimental group achieved an increase of up to a 50% level of self-motivation, significantly surpassing the nationwide average. In all knowledge tests, the experimental group collectively scored 153,5 more points than the control group, which had a higher score in only two tasks. In the overall subject evaluation for the given grading period, the experimental group was more successful in the subject of Chemistry. Based on our pedagogical experience, we can only conclude that didactic games have proven to be beneficial for students learning the subject of Chemistry.

Keywords:

Didactic game, Teaching Chemistry, SRQ-Academic, Knowledge tests, Questionnaire.