The teacher's role in the motivation for learning biological contents

Learning enables acquiring new knowledge. The teacher teaches, leads and is responsible for the teaching process. In order to learn pupils must have the motivation for learning i.e. they must be motivated. In addition to the inner (psychological and physiological) factors of learning the teacher is also important as the external sociological factor. The character and the personality of the teacher of natural science and biology is one of the motivational factors for learning biological contents. The teacher has to obtain appropriate competences, he must apply adequate styles of leading with a didactically oriented attitude and be proficient in communication in order to be successful in the interaction with pupils and he has to create a favourable atmosphere in the class as well. In the empirical part I tried to establish how and to what extent the natural science or biology teacher affects the motivation of pupils, boys and girls, for learning biological contents at the nine-year primary school upper level. The basic aim of this thesis was to determine the role of the competences, personal characteristics and specific didactic attitudes of the teacher which are perceived by the pupils and which affect the motivation of pupils for learning biological contents. I researched the role of the teacher as the source of motivation of pupils for learning biological contents through the analysis of pupils' perceptions of the teachers who teach them natural science or biology subjects. The impact of the perceived teacher's characteristics upon the motivation for learning was assessed by pupils from five primary schools in two different geographical areas. One hundred respondents were from a rural, village school and eighty-four pupils from an urban, city school. The questionnaires were completed by 80 girls and 104 boys from the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th grade of the nine-year primary school. I processed the data obtained from the questionnaire in the computer programme Microsoft Office Excel 2007, while they were analyzed with the inference statistics in the programme SPSS. Based on the statistical processing of data I came to the conclusion that pupils perceive the teacher's methods of motivation very differently. Less successful pupils are more critical to the teacher's methods of motivation. Pupils who participate in extracurricular activities and competitions perceive to a lesser extent the impact of the teacher's method of motivation, as they are more internally motivated for the participation in these activities. Girls perceive the teacher's impact more intensively than boys who, on the other hand, are more critical. Younger pupils and pupils in the rural school perceive the teacher's motivational impact more, while older pupils and the pupils in the city school seem to have a more critical attitude towards the teacher. Pupils believe that fairness is the most important personal characteristics of the teacher. They expect from him to present the subject matter to them in an interesting, lively and comprehensible way