Abstract
The European Union is currently financing, via the 7th frame research programme, international projects which concern themselves with the problematics of education and teaching of mathematics and science. One of them is the project ESTABLISH (European Science and Technology in Action Building Links with Industry, Schools and Home).
As a part of this project, we are preparing inquiry-based activities for the given themes: Polymers around us, which is being prepared by Charles University in Prague and UPJŠ in Košice. Our contribution aims to introduce the inquiry-based activities we created and to show how they improve the teaching of chemistry with the pilot sample of students.
These activities are suggested in concord with the principles of inquiry-based education in such way to lead the students through the educational cycle from stating the problem and expressing the hypothesis to the experimental verification and its theoretical explanation. This means we focus on the purposeful processes of forming the questions, critical experimentation, judging the alternatives, examining and verifying, reaching conclusions and forming coherent arguments.
To interpret the educational activities, we have used various methods, for example the discussion methods, problem education, group and cooperative education or project education.