THE TWENTY FIRST NATIONAL SCIENTIFIC-PRACTICAL CONFERENCE „NATURAL SCIENCE EDUCATION IN A COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL – 2014“: A REVIEW OF CONFERENCE

This year, on April 24th-25th, the 21st National Scientific Practical Conference “Natural science education in a comprehensive school - 2015” took place. This time the participants of the conference gathered at Lazdijai district, Veisiejai gymnasium. The conference was organized by the scientific methodological centre “Scientia Educologica”, and the most important conference partners were - Veisiejai gymnasium and the weekly “Žaliasis pasaulis”. Traditionally, on the first day of the conference two plenary reports were made. Prof.dr. Vincentas Lamanauskas presented a report on the achieved results of the International project “MaT²SMc, Materials for Teaching Together: Science and Mathematics Teachers collaborating for better results”. There are prepared 33 integrated natural science education topics. The material will be presented in the project internet café http://www.mat2smc-project.eu/index.asp?lang=en. Lithuanian Educology University associate professor Rita Makarskaitė-Petkevičienė spoke about the importance of learning in nature. Speaking about primary class pupils' natural science education, the speaker emphasized, that more possibilities should be made for the pupils to learn world cognition in natural surroundings, because this is the way to their better natural science competence. The colleagues from St. Petersburg made a historical report in which they discussed the questions of chemistry teaching methodology history in Russia. In the afternoon the work went on in two sections. In the first section the reports were mostly devoted to pre-school, primary and general natural science education problems. This year, the same way as every year, conference article collection was prepared and published. It is worth to mention, that since 2013 this publication has been serial. Totally13 articles are published in this year edition, in which various natural science problems are discussed. One can dare assert that a certain conference ideology has been formed already. On the one hand, conference is a nice connection “bridge” between academic and pedagogical (teacher) communities. Teachers share their experience, raise important problems, find out certain new information and so on. So, 21st national conference is a history already. As always, not everything was successfully recorded, not all interesting questions discussed. One has to believe, that natural science education movement will continue and develop. 22nd conference is expected to take place in Jonava, in April, 2016.