The Impact of Inquiry-Based Activities on the Development of Pupils' Cognitive Operations

摘要

Inquiry-based activities are increasingly getting into the educational process at different levels of education. Personal experiences, as well as many pieces of research, have confirmed the positive impact of such activities on activating pupils as well as on their learning outcomes. However, these kind of activities can also contribute to the development of pupils' cognitive processes at different levels. In our contribution, we focused on analysing a selected inquiry-based activity to identify specific cognitive operations that could be developed through the activity. Subsequently, the activity was used in education, where pupils in the group performed their own structured research using the students' worksheet. Completed worksheets were analysed in terms of pupils' success in applying cognitive operations to solve partial activity tasks. The results of the analyses brought interesting findings presented in the paper.