engleski

ATTITUDES OF STUDENTS AND TEACHERS ABOUT GROUP WORK IN TEACHING BIOLOGY

The research was conducted on the sample of 238 high school students and 42 biology teachers in secondary schools in 2007 and 2008. Raven's progressive matrices, questionnaires for teachers and students by which their attitudes to group work were examined were used in the research. The students were divided into two groups and questionned a month before and after the lessons at which the experimental group used inquiry-based learning during group work and the control group mostly used frontal lecture-type classes with dialogue. The majority of teachers consider themselves qualified for conducting group work, but it is very rarely carried out, very often as pseudogroup work, so the students are not well trained for group work. Therefore, the change in students' opinions after the experiment can be noticed, but it is statistically insignificant. In spite of the satisfaction with group work that the students show, they still prefer passive teaching methods. Teachers' answers do not correspond to the real behaviour in class. Our results indicate to the need of further research to investigate the reasons why group work in biology lessons is used rarely, despite mostly positive attitudes of most teachers to it, as well as the attitudes of the students who practice group work in longer period of time. Therefore they might suggest how to motivate and encourage the teachers to using group work at biology classes more frequently.

teaching types; team work; group work; cooperative learning; attitudes about group work; gratification in group work

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