Development of students' self-learning and self-assessment skills using checklists in biology classes

Abstract

Relevance. The research relevance is predetermined by the need to form a students' mobile personality, capable of quickly adapting to changing conditions in the modern educational process. Despite this, the scientific literature devotes insufficient attention to the development of independence in the study of most school subjects, including biology. All this motivates researchers to search for new approaches to teaching academic disciplines. Purpose. The research goal is to evaluate the suitability and effectiveness of checklists usage in forming independence skills in biology lessons. Methodology. Methods of descriptive statistics and one-factor dispersive analysis were used for the statistical analysis of the data. Results. During the formative experiment, it was determined that the best results of self-learning were noted in the first experimental group of students where not only checklists were used in the educational process, but also success criteria were drawn up for the topics from the "Basics of Cytology" topic of a school course. These results especially differed for the better in comparison to the control group. Using a single-factor analysis of variance, it was determined that the differences in the level of academic knowledge between the three experimental groups of students and one control group were statistically reliable at a high level of significance. Conclusions. In general, the experiment showed the suitability and pedagogical effectiveness of checklists for the development of self-learning skills and self-assessment in the process of studying biology. The practical value of the research lies in the fact that checklists and success criteria have been tested in the conditions of a modern school and were proposed to improve the quality of teaching biology at school. Keywords: learning strategies; biology course; learning skills; pedagogical technologies; improving the quality of teaching