Lessons of the environmental studies in the primary school reform

The subject of environmental studies has appeared in the primary school curriculum with the reform of the obligatory schooling at the end of the previous century. It is a successor of the subject of natural and social sciences, which was taught at primary schools in slovenia since 1957. As the subject of natural and social sciences, the subject of environmental studies also follows interdisciplinary issues. It integrates contents from different scientific areasnatural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, techniques, technologies) and sociological sciences (history, geography, sociology, ethnology). It is also taught in the first three classes of the primary school, three lessons a week, with that difference, that it starts to be taught with one year younger children (six-year-old) and that there are two teachers in the classroom or a combination - teacher and a kindergarten teacher. The differences between the two subjects can be found in the curriculum. The curriculum for the subject of environmental studies includes recent theoretical, developmental, psychological and methodical issues. With the comparative analysis of the curriculum for the subject of environmental studies and for the subject of natural and social sciences, where for criteria basic elements of curriculum were included, we have found out that differences appear in goals, contents, methods and assessment of curriculum. With the empirical research we tried to find out, how the planed changes in the curriculum for the subject of environmental studies in practice were realized. Did the teachers succeed to overcome some specific problems, which appeared in the subject of natural and social sciencesas for example: no balance of goals, the establishment of the extent and depth of the content, the modest selection of interaction and methods... evaluation studies (Šegula,1964Adamic, 1984, 1990) pointed to these and others problems and also some researches (Cencic, 1983Hus, 1996). In our reseach we have restrained to the first class and we have tried to found out, how lessons of the subject of environmental studies in the first class of the "new - nine year system" (which includes schooling for the children starting at the age of6 and cintinuing through the age of 15). Quantitative and qualitative differs from the lesson of the subject of natural and social sciences in the first grade of the "old - eight year system" primary school (which includes children who started to learn in the school at the age of 7, finishing at the age of 15). We focused on planning and excecution in both subjects within three common ranges of topics. We compared teaching aims and analysed their dimensions. We analysed the appropriatness or suitability of interaction, teaching metods, teaching aids, resources, lesson structure or stages of lessons and the partipation of students in relation to the achievement of the teaching aims in both subjects, environmental studies and natural and social science. We were also interested the pupils attitude towards the respective subject. We investigated the teachers opinion on the reformed school subject. The basic research method was causal non-experimenta method of pedagogic research. The data were processed by the means of quantitative and qualitative methods. We discovered that the teaching of the subject of environmental studies is of better quality if compared to the teaching of the natural and social science in most of the aspects regarding the supervised didactic components. We percieve this as a result of different conceptual and didactic structure of subject of environmental studies, additional continuous and team work of teaching staff of the teaching of the above mentioned subjects. Furthermore itis due to a better material basis for the executions of lessons in environmental studies, a lower number of pupils in the class and also due to the fenomen of the inovation. The finding that the pupils feel better and the teachers as well as assistant teachers have more pozitive attitude towards the subject is very stimulatin