ABSTRACT
This article has substantiated the need to use innovative didactical means—cognitive tests with a reflective close for the formation, development and diagnostics of the intellectual reflection in the study of classical and molecular genetics in the 9th and 10th grade. There are presented authors' versions of tests with a reflective close to activate and to measure two properties which characterize intellectual reflection skills—productivity of reflective thinking and awareness of their own mental activities of 15–16-year-old students. Each of the developed tests is structured in two subtests. The first subtest is composed by following the model of criteria-oriented tests and it contains tasks designed to update the pupils' reflection acts over their own cognitive activity. The second subtest is marked with the term “reflective close” (end) and it includes questions that require students' reasoning on their methods of action applied to solving the tasks of the first subtest. With the results from solving the first subtest we measure the productivity of the reflective thinking, and the results from the second test are used for judging the level at which students are aware of the reasons of their own cognitive actions. We determined the qualities reliability and validity of the constructed tests by the expert evaluation and testing them among a sample of 170 students in 9th and 10th grade. The results of statistical processing of empirical data were performed with the program SPSS 13.00 and they give us the confidence to say that the overall set of tasks with the additional to them a reflective close are reliable and valid means for development and diagnostics of the intellectual reflection in school teaching in genetics.