INQUIRY-BASED SCIENCE EDUCATION (IBSE) - GOOD PRACTICES

This study aims at presenting the development and implementation of the inquiry-based method(research) at Shumen University, created as a result of the work on four European educational projects withinten years. The reason for the development of new teaching methods, approaches and technologies is the seriousdecline in the interest in education of young people and the change in the values and interests of the newgeneration. A special downturn marks the interest in natural sciences and mathematics. Within the activities ofCOSMOS project, originally five methods were probated by all partners. The inquiry-based method of studywas one of the most creative training methods. The reason is that in this method the students themselves reachrelevant new knowledge under the mentoring role of the teacher. From a passive participant the learner becomesan active explorer of the new knowledge. The article examines the consistent approbation and implementationof this method initially only in the teaching of natural sciences, and later in other subjects.One of the main products created as a result of the projects described is a set of various educational resourcesprovided in the repository of an educational portal. The educational resources were created by the projects’teams, the participants in the projects’ training seminars and other interested in the issues of methodology usersof the respective portals. The target groups of the resources are mainly teachers and professors wishing to applythe inquiry-based approach in their work. The good practices in view are probated and evaluated by numeroustrainers from different countries. The article gives account only of some of the best and most widely usededucational resources. In chronological order the projects we have worked on are: COSMOS (2006),PATHWAY (2010), LD-Skills (2011) and GEOTHNK (2013). The development and globalization of WEBbasedresources has led over the years to merging the initially-created databases into a larger one, as the ODSportal, for instance. A part of this database is the set of educational resources of the project GEOTHNK. In thefirst three projects creating training materials required generating a metadata file from software especiallydeveloped for this purpose and respectively the use of these resources also required specialized software such asReload player. With the last project all educational resources are uploaded and used without requiringspecialized software, which greatly facilitates their use. A major element in the use of these resources is the factthat all users are also authors enriching the existing database with new original resources and links to usefulexisting ones. This is a good challenge to the teachers on the way to their improvement.