Modern education increasingly emphasizes the development of scientific skills to equip students for contemporary challenges. Developing such skills is essential for scientific literacy. In biology species distinguishing and following determination are key skills. In educational practice, through textbooks and the use of determination keys, specific species of organisms are typically described on the basis of selected determination morphological features. However, the first step of species identification is to distinguish, that the organisms differ. This peculiar step is often neglected in education, and it is not mapped whether students are able to recognize distinct species in order to proceed to search for specific features. To reflect this authentic aspect of species identification in biology, a set of tasks has been developed that require students to visually distinguish between organisms without additional information or feature specification. The aim of this pilot study was to develop such organisms’ species distinguishing tasks enabling the obtaining of eye-tracking data about students’ skills. The focus was on evaluating technical feasibility, estimating average completion time, identifying problematic aspects of the tasks that may require revision, and collecting student feedback for further development. Additionally, the pilot aimed to describe students’ problem-solving processes qualitatively. Both successful and unsuccessful as a foundation for a follow-up study. The pilot was conducted with four lower secondary school students. The average solution time ranged from 16 to 33 seconds per task. None of the tasks were solved correctly by all students, suggesting that the tasks possess the potential to identify students’ misleading strategies. Three of the tasks were not solved correctly by any participant. In two of these cases, the difficulty appeared to stem from intraspecific variability, shifting the challenge from recognizing fixed diagnostic traits to evaluating the degree of similarity among observed features. This phenomenon seems to require more attention and shows the direction for the following research.

Acknowledgments:
This publication was supported by Grant Agency of Charles University grant No. 46924.

Keywords: Scientific skills, science literacy, species determination, science education, secondary education