NATURAL SCIENCE SUBJECTS IN THE SCHOOL BY THE VIEWPOINT OF THE SENIOR PUPILS OF THE BASIC SCHOOL

Teaching natural sciences (particularly chemistry) in comprehensive school remain the main problem-causing field. The attention devoted to the sciences is decreasing. A global tendency is clear: interest in science is decreasing, the number of university students choosing science curricula has been constantly declining, and scientific knowledge in society (especially among younger people) is inadequate. In our opinion, humanity verges on social cataclysms owing to inadequate natural science education as well as on insufficient and often improper knowledge of nature and human being. Natural sciences (including chemistry) give us most fundamentally knowledge about the world of nature. The encouragement of the young people`s interest in science is the essential scientific problem. Due to the alteration of the educational paradigms we must search for new quality approaches to teaching chemistry and other sciences. The majority of investigations demonstrates that natural sciences are not popular in comprehensive school. The schoolchildren of forms 11 and 12 (762 respondents) took part in a survey carried out in September 1993. The results of the survey reveal that the most favorite subject is biology and the least acceptable is chemistry (Lamanauskas, 2003). A comparative study of Lithuanian and Latvian comprehensive school students provides similar tendencies (Lamanauskas, Gedrovics, Raipulis, 2004) and repeatedly illustrates that biology and chemistry hold the same positions among the Lithuanian pupils. The Latvian pupils gave priority to geography while chemistry was not much preferred. Thus, this research analysis schoolchildren`s approach to natural sciences. The object of research is to examine some aspects of chemistry and other natural sciences teaching/learning in basic school of Lithuania and Latvia. The major aim is to define the pupils` favourite natural sciences, to give a self - assessment of their knowledge about natural sciences and the fields of studies they intend to choose after graduation. The survey has been carried out in order to reveal the tendencies of teaching/learning chemistry and natural sciences in forms 8, 9 and 10.