Lower-secondary students' drawings as a tool for finding their knowledge about human body constitution

Presented bachelor thesis evaluates drawings of primary school pupils in relation to determine their knowledge about human body from biological point of view. There were involved 120 pupils in this research. Sixty of them were from the 6th grade and the other 60 pupils were from the 8th grade. Students were supposed to draw and describe internal structures of human body, which they considered as importnant, on printed silhouette of human body in the given paper. They were also asked to link those organs into functional organ systems. After that, they arbitrarily chose two of those systems, which they were supposed to describe more in detail and draw them again into two additional silhouettes. The evaluation was made on the basis of previously established criteria, which were based on the evaluation of drawings in Reiss and Tunnicliffe (2001) research. There were also watched chosen misconceptions about human body structure in created drawings. In evaluating the number of drawn internal structures in the first summary drawing, the pupils of the 6th grade achieved mostly the level involving 8 - 9 drawn internal structures, while the majority of the pupils of the 8th grade reached the lower level, involving only 6 - 7 drawn internal structures. Of all the drawn internal structures which were drawn by both grades, the most frequent were brain and heart. In terms of misplaced internal structures the 6th grade pupils had more wrongly drawn structures of human body than the 8th grade pupils. In assessment of functional connection of organs into individual organ systems was found that almost none of the pupils were able to connect the organs into complete organ systems. In the second part of testing, most of the 6th grade pupils chose respiratory and digestive systems, and the 8th grade pupils chose respiratory and nerve systems