Inquiry-based teaching and learning methods are more and more widely used in the teaching natural sciences all over the world. The elements of inquiry are included in many national sciences’ core curricula and indicate that students should be actively involved in acquiring knowledge. This fact changes the teacher’s role in the classroom and the structure of everyday lessons. Independent inquiry helps students to develop various elements of scientific education, gain specific skills and competencies. Consequently, the assessment methods used so far are no longer sufficient and they should be expanded with new strategies, tools, and criteria. In recent years, there were many projects, in which teachers were trained in using both inquiry-based instructions and formative assessment. So far, unfortunately, there has been limited information on how teachers bring theory into practice and combine the new teaching and assessment methods, and how they adopt available teaching materials during everyday classes. This case study explored how experienced chemistry teachers, who have broad content, pedagogical content, and inquiry methodology knowledge, integrate inquiry-based teaching with formative assessment for the first time. The results of the study revealed the main limiting factors and teachers’ dilemmas.

Europe. While participating in the realisation of the aforementioned projects, the partners had to mutually determine how they understood inquiry, what its characteristic features were, and which inquiry elements they wanted to develop/promote. Many of those projects used the definition of IBSE proposed by Linn, Davis and Bell (2004), who stated that inquiry is the: ' …intentional process of diagnosing problems, critiquing experiments, and distinguishing alternatives, planning investigations, researching conjectures, searching for information, constructing models, debating with peers, and forming coherent arguments. (p. 4)' . This definition is in line with the National Research Council (1996) guides, where students engaged in inquiry ' …describe objects and events, ask questions, construct explanations, test those explanations against current scientific knowledge, and communicate their ideas to others. (p. 2)' . Apart from the definition, invaluable contributions from Bybee (2000; should be noted, where among others, three descriptions of inquiry for teachers were provided and the 5E inquiry cycle was described. Those elements were used in almost all of the 7FP EU projects.Observing the history of the global IBSE implementation, one might think that both the process itself and its effects have been thoroughly studied already. However, despite the fact that education experts have extensively described their experience connected with teachers' training on the application of inquiry and have published the results of completed case studies, the extent to which training in the IBSE influences teachers' practices and students' achievement is still unclear (Capps, Crawford, & Constas, 2012;Ermeling, 2010). In this research, an attempt was made to examine the effect of the teacher training in the IBSE on their professional practices. The training encompassed by the research was carried out within the framework of the SAILS FP7 project. This project was realised in 12 European countries from 2012 to 2015, and during its realisation, more than 2500 of pre-service and in-service teachers participated in the trainings (Jönsson et al., 2015). The aim of the project was to prepare the teachers to teach through inquiry as well as have the confidence and competence in the assessment of their students' learning.The described research was carried out among in-service teachers participating in the project in Poland. In the Polish curriculum, the inquiry-based methods are not listed among the required/recommended teaching methods unambiguously, however, advised teacher/student actions and skills to be developed are in line with the competencies that are taught with IBSE (Polish Core Curriculum, 2008). The designed and implemented teacher education programme (TEP) was based on the framework developed within the SAILS project. The research carried out among the participants of the training was meant to answer a general question: "What is the effect of the training on the actual teachers' school practices?" The authors of the TEP an...

Reasoning skills can be described as abilities to use scientific knowledge to identify and solve problems, and to formulate conclusions based on empirical observations. The European Union promotes the development of reasoning skills as a way to grow knowledgeable and responsible citizens. In a school classroom, the development of reasoning skills can be stimulated by the use of inquiry-based methods. Students’ reasoning skills are frequently measured and compared by many national and international programmes (e.g. PISA). It is obvious that teachers who help students to develop reasoning skills should also have a high level of those skills, however, the teachers who currently work in Central/Eastern European schools have had no opportunity to learn through or even experience inquiry, neither to participate in programmes measuring the level of reasoning skills. In this research, Lawson’s tests were used to measure the level of reasoning skills among science teachers (n = 71) before and after training in using inquiry-based methods. The results showed that reasoning skills are the best developed by physics teachers. Training in using inquiry helps biology and chemistry teachers improve and close the gap between them and physics teachers.