Abstract
Activities of the European Union (EU) provide incentives but also new demands on the educational reform in the EU member states. When the EU was established, the educational system was originally regarded as a distinct national area that would differ one country from another.
Nowadays it is evident that this original pre-requisite has not been fulfilled, quite the contrary has arisen. At first, cross-comparing of the educational outcomes in the individual countries was initiated within the international research such as TIMSS or PISA, then this was followed by recommendations and by the EU programs that directly focused the national educational systems towards the reforms required by EU.
The curricular reform in the Czech Republic was implemented in the period of 2000-2010, already in accordance with the EU program and this reform defined new demands on the expected educational results, in particular in the area of competencies and the related skills. A focus of our study was to identify and set a hierarchy of the required science skills of pupils/students at different stages of elementary and secondary school and to determine the level of these skills in terms of intended, realised and acquired curriculum.
The starting point for the proposed system of skills was IBSE (Inquiry Based Science Education). The basic method of our research became the method of critical analysis of strategic European and national documents and subject-field literature as well as questionnaire investigations and their statistical evaluation.