Secondary School Students’ Ability to Work With the Tasks Designed for Biology Olympiad

Abstract

For the possibility of using competitive tasks from the Biology Olympiad (BiO), either directly or after certain adaptations for everyday teaching tasks in the teaching process, it was aimed to determine if students could work meaningfully with them. The success of 2nd-year secondary school students (n = 113) in solutions of tasks (n = 5) designated for BiO was compared with the solutions by the regional round BiO´s participants. One-way analysis of variance and Tukey´s multiple comparison test were used for the statistical evaluation of the data. The research shows that secondary school students achieved an average success rate of 47.58 ± 12.51 % and BiO participants 62.69 ± 9.86 %. Within the results of all selected tasks, at least someone of the class of the secondary students achieved similar results in each of the tasks as BiO participants. That indicates that secondary school students were able to work meaningfully with BiO tasks which confirmed students' eligibility for work with these tasks. Keywords: biology education, Biology Olympiad, difficulty of tasks, learning tasks, science education