Eva Trnová

INCLUSION OF TEACHER CONSTRUCTIVISM IN SYSTEMATIC PROFESSIONAL CONTINUOUS DEVELOPMENT

To improve the quality of school education and lifelong learning, it is necessary to support teacher continuous professional development. The aim of the study is to present outcomes of research of innovative teacher professional continuous development courses. Design-based research was used as the main research method. A key result of the research is the finding that teacher education, including professional continuous development, has to be closely linked with practical experience through the use of a systematic and teacher constructivist approach. Constructivist principles and characteristics of teacher professional continuous development courses were studied within the PROFILES project. Building up teachers’ pedagogical competences, using their own experience from learning and teaching and thus connecting pedagogical theory and practice is the core of teacher constructivism.

Matrix Model of Structure of Biochemistry Curriculum

We have created Matrix Model of Structure of Biochemistry Curriculum on the basis of theoretical analysis of the information (so far known) in the field of the data mining and analytical-synthetic approaches to problem solving. The analysis in our approach is understood as a scientific method which is based on the decomposition of the whole to elemental parts. The aim of the analysis is to identify essential features of the elementary parts of the whole. Synthesis is understood as a process of a new joining of two or more elemental parts into the final unit so that the information obtained can lead to a better understanding of relationships between the modeled objects and phenomena.

The Relevance of Health and Environmental Education in Chemistry for Pupils of Czech Secondary Schools and School-leavers

Abstract The aim of the authors of this article was to find out how much importance Czech pupils and school-leavers who are not professionally engaged in chemistry attach to those topics of Health and Environmental Education included among the obligatory outcomes in Chemistry for Lower Secondary Schools. The research was carried out by means of a questionnaire administrated to 576 pupils aged 14-18 years and 122 school-leavers people with finished education). The conclusion was that as for subjective respondents’ opinion on the importance of learned skill outcomes, the respondents preferred topics of Health Education to those of Environmental Education. Moreover, the authors have found that the interest in prevention and first aid increases with growing age of the respondents. The pupils’ interest in environmental topics is very low. On the contrary, school-leavers show an overwhelming interest in chemistry of nutrition and in environmental protection. This discrepancy should probably be solved by better motivation of pupils in the future.