Abstrakt
Scientific thinking is an essential skill for full application in society associated with responsible human decision-making. The development of inquiry skills also contributes to its complexity.
Inquiry skills are an essential part of science literacy. For the possibility of their systematic development, it is necessary to understand the current situation of students in primary schools.
The aim of the research was to find out what are the skills of students in the field to correctly formulate a research question based on the characterized problem and ability to formulate an answer to a given research question. For this purpose, two experimental and two observationally oriented inquiry tasks were used.
The tasks were solved by 58 Czech students from the seventh grade of primary school. It was found that more than half of the students were not able to formulate the research question correctly.
More than one third of the students could not even formulate an answer to the given research question based on the performed research. In formulating the answer to the research question, a difference was found depending on the nature of the exploration phase.
More students were able to formulate an answer to inquiry tasks using an experiment than to observational tasks. The results provide a pilot insight into the difficulties in inquiry skills.
The causes of failure and the possibility of effective intervention require further research attention.