THE COGNITIVE ACCELERATION CURRICULUM AS A TOOL FOR OVERCOMING DIFFICULTIES IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF INQUIRY SKILLS IN SCIENCE EDUCATION AMONG PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

Many primary school pupils find it difficult to apply inquiry skills in general and variable control in particular, and fail to appreciate the importance of control groups in scientific research. The present study focused on levels of thinking among sixth-graders in the course of an open-ended inquiry activity, by following the planning and execution of an experiment, isolation and variable control, and the difficulties encountered by students in the implementation of various inquiry skills. The study population consisted of forty-four sixth-graders from a primary school in the Arab sector in Israel's Northern District. The students were divided into two groups, one that underwent a process of intervention in teaching in the form of three lessons using the CASE approach, while the other learned with the New Outlook textbook. The study's results point to a significant difference between the CASE intervention group and the New Outlook intervention group with respect to the final grade of the "variable identification and connection test". An examination of the differences in student achievement between the pre- and post-test reveals an improvement in the post-test final scores among the CASE group of students, in comparison to the New Outlook group.