THE ABILITY OF SCIENCE STUDENTS TO MAKE CONCLUSIONS.

The article focuses on problem solving and decision making abilities being developed in students through science education. The basic aim of science education is to cultivate the ability of students to apply an experimental method of thinking. Cultivating the ability in students to make valid conclusions, as an integral part of the problem-solving method, is an important specific goal of science teaching. In relation to this, the results of an experimental study are presented in the article, which was conducted to test the efficiency of a problem-solving technique of teaching ninth-grade general science in terms of the students' ability to make conclusions. The study reveals that the students with good reading ability are more likely to show initial skill in the ability to infer, than are those not so well able to read. Also, mental ability and reading ability are very poor indications of the ability to improve one's skill in making conclusions.