The study presents selected results of a research on subjective theories of physics teachers at lower secondary schools. Against the background of current transformation of the Czech school curriculum the author focuses on the category of „teaching goals“. In an effort to find out what goals should be pursued in physics instruction according to teachers and how these goals are achieved through teaching, a research was conducted on subjective theories of teachers. The research, which follows the video analysis of physics carried out by the Educational Research Centre, Faculty of Eduation, Masaryk University (Janík a Miková, 2006), involved eleven teachers with whom semi-structured interviews were held. The teachers’ statements were then coded using a categorial system covering various aspects of their subjective theories (teaching goals, conceptions of subject matter, teaching and learning, pupils’ preconceptions, role of experiments). In this paper we present only the results related to the issue of teaching goals. We offer answers to these two questions: 1) What goals should be pursued in physics instruction according to teachers? 2) How do teachers achieve these goals through physics instruction? The results suggest that teachers consider the most important goal in physics instruction improving pupils’ awareness of the significance of physics for understanding everyday problems and basic physical concepts and principles. Concerning achieving teaching goals we mostly identified explicit work with goals whereas the category of „goals“ is in most cases matched with the category of „content“. Teachers scarcely referred to achieving the goals that would enhance reflection and awareness of a learning situation of pupils.
Learning tasks are sets of specific requirements on the pupil’s learning. Didactically, the key question is what potential learning tasks carry for the process of pupils’ learning. This paper brings the results of a systematic analysis of the video recordings of 27 lower-secondary lessons of physics. Answers to the following questions are sought: How many learning tasks take place in a lesson? How long are they? How long do different phases of a learning task take (instruction, solving, check)? Who is the solver of the learning tasks? What approach do the learning tasks require? The findings show that solving learning tasks takes up 63 per cent of the lesson time; there are 6 learning tasks in an average lesson. Typically, the teacher solves the task in interaction with the pupils. Most of the learning tasks require verbal solution; experimental learning tasks are rare.
Contemporary approach to foreign language education is based on the communicative approach and the communicative competence as its goal. The question is, to what extent the goals are reflected in foreign language classes. The aim of the presented empirical study was to explore the quantity of opportunities which pupils have to develop language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) in Czech lower-secondary English classes. The research employs a video-based methodology. A research instrument – a system of categories based on the concept of language skills was developed. The research findings showed that pupils had more opportunities to use receptive skills (reading, listening) than productive skills (speaking, writing). Receptive skills were more often than productive skills used in separation. All language skills were often used in integration but there were not many opportunities for pupils to engage in more complex activities integrating three or four language skills.
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