Ongoing school reform in Slovakia has started in 2009 with new state curriculum for all levels. In this paper we
are concerned about main changes of physics education at lower secondary school: inquiry – based teaching,
the definition of science process skills in curriculum and focus on their importance before content standard. New
inquiry-based textbooks had been developed in five years. Nowadays the most discussed issue of science education
is assessment of science process skills. As Harlen (2013) points out “Unless these (science process skills) are
included in the assessment there is a real danger that they are neglected in teaching” (p.48).
At the beginning of this paper we introduce the understanding of science process skills in current standard
(SPU, 2009) and previous standard (SPU, 2002). We also discuss scientific experiment (the focus is
on hypothesizing) in context of the interdisciplinary relations in separately taught science subjects (physics,
chemistry, biology and geography). In the main part we were focused on examination of external test tasks. We
were interested in two aims:
x To compare results for three types of tasks –planning experiment (hypothesizing), interpretation of results
and making conclusions.
x To identify the benefits of the real experiment or model situation as the form of feedback. Tasks results were
compared with observed student´s performance – how they design the experiment, control the variables and
discuss.