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Promoting students’ key competences for making evidence-based decisions on controversial socio-scientific issues

Funder: European CommissionProject code: 2020-1-EE01-KA201-078008
Funded under: ERASMUS+ | Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices | Strategic Partnerships for school education Funder Contribution: 306,630 EUR

Promoting students’ key competences for making evidence-based decisions on controversial socio-scientific issues

Description

The frequent incidence of pseudo-scientific information, conspiracy theories, and “alternative” facts in media is a new reality. Despite a modern raised level of education and standard of living, the number of people, adopting beliefs that are patently at odds with observable reality and scientific evidence, is a growing concern. This kind of alienation from “objectivity” or “truth” may be related to the people’s inability to sort evidence-based information from an unjustified opinion because of the enormously increased volume of information, but also of poor media or science literacy itself. Unfortunately, most (science) teachers lack skills to tackle socially acute science related issues susceptible to controversies and social escalation in the classroom, many of which raised by students in the context of health. Teaching complex problems and the development of key competences may require more knowledge and skills from teachers than has been “normally” needed for teaching a single subject. This obstacle may be, actually, overcome through the close collaboration between different types of teachers (teachers of different subjects, school levels, school types - GE, VET, HE). The need to promote such collaboration is also emphasised in different educational strategies, although the current collaboration remains rather modest. Therefore, the main aim of this project is to create a relevant model for implementing EVIDENCE methodology, together with respective teaching-learning materials, that will contribute to the development of students’ key competences, such as literacy, science, media, digital, and citizenship competence of both GE and VET schools, while addressing socially acute and sensitive science related issues within the context of medicine, healthcare, and the environment more generally. Also, by this approach, including a number of challenging and innovative learning activities such as mythbusting, data digital visualisation, role-plays, debates, etc., it is hoped to make science learning more motivating and personally meaningful for diverse groups of students - those who are interested in science, and also those with a lack of interest and low academic achievement who can be seen as potential school leavers. All learning materials (6 modules, each addressing a separate controversial topic supported amongst the other materials by video scenarios and video tutorials) are created in an interactive manner on an innovative Fachwerk platform. The development of materials, executed through several workshops, is based on an instructional design model consisting of pre-production, production, and post-production. The first includes needs, tasks, learner, and goal analyses while in the production phase, the final design will be developed, and all the necessary components for its completion will be created and integrated through a use of rapid prototyping and recurrent evaluation. In the post-production phase, the finished product will be made ready to those who are going to use it. Anticipated impact: •Improvement of both, GE and VET students’ (age group 15-18) motivation to learn science, raised key competences, and readiness to make personally and socially responsible and well-considered health related decisions, which in a wider perspective, will contribute to the improved general societal wellbeing in project countries or in a region.•Raised skills of students in using creatively digital visualisation techniques to communicate with other people, which, amongst the other key competences being essential for 21st century workforce, will lead to their better employability.•Improved teacher performance, self-efficacy, and motivation of GE, VET and HE teachers and a demonstration of practice that will competently address socially sensitive and controversial science-related issues; improvement of skills for using digital tools, and raised effectiveness to develop students’ key competences in classroom. •Improved collaboration between teachers and educators of different types of educational institutions (GE, VET, HE) may give a further impetus to the development of educational models enabling flexible learning pathways between GE, VET, and HE institutions operationalising, thereby, the idea of “seamless” education in partner countries.•Students’ raised ability to recognise demagogy and information lacking evidence, and their ability to create well-considered and argumented decisions as citizens, will lead our society towards a more balanced and sustainable direction.•Through the dissemination of project ideas and results to a wider community of teachers, teacher educators, science education researchers, and educational policy makers, it is hoped to initiate a wider European discourse on the “post-truth” challenges for education.

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