SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ACTIVITY EVALUATION: LITHUANIAN UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS' POSITION

Human progress is inseparable from scientific achievements. The role of scientific achievements and knowledge in the modern world progress process is evident. Science can help the humanity a lot: create a more comfortable life, predict natural phenomena, foster humanistic traditions, educate society, change the development of society and so on. Today it is obvious, that the basis of country's prosperity is its members' perceptiveness, ability to discover, research and create. Therefore, society, its education system is concerned with forming conditions, encouraging young generation to try their abilities in scientific research activity, develop necessary competences and to know scientist's, researcher's activity and career peculiarities already in a secondary school. After carrying out the research, the opinions of upper secondary school students (9-12 forms) about scientific research activity at school were analysed, Lithuanian comprehensive school upper secondary school students' attitude towards researcher, scientist's activity was revealed. Factor analysis was carried out applying the main component method and Varimax rotation with Kaiser Normalization. After carrying out this analysis it became clear that upper secondary school students do not relate their future with scientific research activity, researcher's career is considered to be not perspective and of low prestige.