Abstract:

During the school years 2014/2015 and 2015/2016, with the participation of 685 students from 7th, 8th, 9th grade, from four schools in Bulgaria, six summary lessons in biology from the sections ‘Animal Kingdom’, ‘Sustainable Development and Healthy Lifestyle’ and ‘Biotic and Abiotic Factors’ were held in the form of a debate.

We conducted a pedagogical experiment in the two successive school years. These two cross-sectional studies had two stages each:
In the first stage, a survey was conducted with 13 questions, examining the opinion of the students after conducting biology lessons through the interactive form of debate. We explored the change in motivation by taking into account interest, attitude and communication.

In the second stage, we investigated through applied didactic tests the degree of increase in students' competencies as a result of the application of the interactive form of debate.

The overall analysis of the study shows that non-traditional methodology for learning through debate is of interest to students and increases their motivation for learning, and hence the success, quantity, quality and durability of their acquired key competencies in science, learning skills and skills for sustainable development and healthy living.

Keywords:

Debate, students, biology and health education, motivation, key competencies.