In most school subjects the verbalization of the knowledge is a presumption for the finding out of the knowledge acquired at school. Especially so far the oral examining of the pupils is concerned a certain measure of the pupils readiness to convey meanings, of the syntactic correctness and accuracy are assumed. Unfortunately by far not all learners acquire the necessary level of verbal skills and the tendency seems to be rather falling in this respect.
The teachers attribute slowleness and the syntactic and semantic inaccuracy in conveying meanings with those pupils who do not fulfil those demands to their insufficient knowledge. Consequentionally the object of the experiment was to find out the possibility of the eventual applying of the production of free words associations of the key words of the tradifionally formulated questions (as an auxiliary diagnostic method). The experiment was conducted with two different samples (grammar school students and learners from the secondary apprentices institutions (the SOU) in two school subjects, history and physics. With the free words associations the syntactic and semantic responses fall off.
It has been proved that also the apprentices whose verbalization level was significantly lower than that of the grammar school students and whose knowledge, when tested by the means of traditional methods, were nearly unsufficient, produced associations a) to more items of association tests (in comparison to the traditional school knowledge tests) b) more answers to one question (stimulus words). The association tests provided more information in both school subjects from which the level of the learners’ knowledge could be derived than the usual school knowledge tests.