Abstract:

Authentic learning responds to the needs of nowadays’ society in anchoring more powerfully to the reality of today’s education. It places the student into the middle of the learning process, the teacher being a facilitator of learning or a partner of the student in constructing the new knowledge. Authentic learning is characterised by: relevance, weakly defined tasks, most often collected from the life experience of students, interdisciplinary/integrated approaches and using of strategies based on investigation and cooperative learning, on reflection and metacognition, on integration of evaluation into learning and real products creation. In projecting these authentic learning activities, the teacher is aware of his/her students' needs and interests and their background and experience, following their cognitive, affective, psychomotor and conative progress.

The present research has implied experts in didactics, MA students, PhD students and primary school teachers. The research aimed to establish: the subjects' opinion regarding the necessity and the utility of authentic learning in the primary school, the characteristics of authentic learning, the frequency of using authentic learning activities, the sources of the authentic tasks given to students, the difficulties encountered by the primary school teachers in planning and creating authentic learning activities, the strategies used in the authentic learning situations.

The results show the openness of teachers to authentic learning but also a low frequency of authentic learning activities in primary school due to the existence of numerous difficulties regarding the selection of the authentic learning tasks, the used methodology, the organization of learning activities and the evaluation.

Keywords:

Authentic learning, survey, primary school, teacher.