Abstract:

Health is an important concern for individuals, communities and society. Health is part of each of us, it is the main factor of physical and mental development.

In Romania, health education is complementarily addressed in the curriculum, in the following subjects: natural sciences, civic education, personal development (in primary education), biology, counselling and guidance (in secondary education). In December 2001, the National Programme "Health Education in the Romanian School" was implemented, and in 2004, the optional subject "Health Education" was introduced in the school-based curriculum.

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is a learning process through which the student develops knowledge, skills, attitudes and values regarding personal hygiene, healthy lifestyle (including life-threatening accident prevention behaviours). In IBL activities students alone or guided by the teacher: ask questions, express their curiosity about a given topic; collect data, research information from various sources on a specific topic and search for answers; they make an assumption, a hypothesis about the knowledge gained through documentation; they carry out a plan/project/experiment to test the accuracy of the assumption/hypothesis; they put the plan into practice; draw conclusions from the research; they reflect on changes in conceptions, differentiate between the level of initial and current knowledge about the topic; they share findings, turning them into practical applications, thus contextualising learning.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate teachers' attitudes and beliefs about the use of inquiry-based learning in teaching and learning health education.

The research was conducted using a structured survey as an instrument:
(a) teachers' views on the importance of health education for primary school students and
(b) teachers' attitudes and beliefs towards the use of inquiry-based learning in teaching health education.

The survey was applied to a target group of both teachers and students with different specialisations and teaching experiences. The results show that teachers are interested in the health education subject. They also appreciate the importance of research in learning specific health education content.

Keywords:

Health education, inquiry-based learning, use of IBL in health education, teachers' attitudes.