Development of Reading Literacy of Students in Biology Teaching at Lower Secondary School

Reading literacy is indispensable literacy for every individual on his way through education and his future full-fledged application in everyday life. Each state aims to increase the level of educational attainment in the country. To develop pupils' reading skills can help them to achieve better results in education, including in science education. For the possibility of developing reading skills, it is necessary to map their current situation in elementary schools. The aim of this work was to map the reading skills of pupils in the teaching of biology at the lower secondary school. For this purpose, a set of six worksheets containing three-tier tasks was created and was solved by 110 pupils in the lower secondary school. When creating the three- tier tasks, the author relied on the theoretical starting points of this work, which include the issues of scientific literacy and reading literacy, including the results of Czech pupils in the tests on literacy skills, the Czech curriculum system and the typology of learning tasks. From the evaluation of the worksheets, it was found that the students answered all the questions from the set of worksheets with an average success rate of 57 %. According to gender, the success rate difference was statistically insignificant