DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONTENT OF THE "BIOLOGY I" SET OF METHODOLOGICAL MATERIALS FOR A COMPETENCE-BASED APPROACH TO SECONDARY SCHOOL BIOLOGY

The competence-based approach has raised important questions in education regarding the content of learning, the way teachers teach and students learn, and the assessment of learning. General education in Latvia has been reformed, and the content of competence-based education was introduced in 2023. In STEM curricula, the content is developed in the context of the Big Ideas, and the number of teaching hours is restructured. Only 105 teaching hours are foreseen for biology at the optimal secondary level, which is twice less than before. So, it was important to learn how this approach is implemented in the biology content to achieve learning outcomes defined in the Latvian secondary education standard, what opinion of biology teachers is on the content of Biology I curriculum developed by Skola2030, and what the content of the biology methodological material should be. Through mapping of learning outcomes and the survey of biology teachers, the main problems were identified: insufficient number of lessons, illogical sequence of topics and subtopics, and lack of teaching resources. On this basis, a set of Biology I methodological materials was developed. Keywords: biology education, content of secondary school curriculum, integration of Big Ideas, set of methodological materials, competence-based approach