Project activities and results page
AIM of the project:
The particular activities, which will be implemented under the project, are:
1. Involvement of participants (schools involvement)
Result: A database of the involved schools, teachers and students will be created and their data will be available in the online learning and teaching platform.
2. Research on creative pedagogical approaches focused on enhancing comprehension in teaching and learning sciences
Result: The research will be necessary for creative pedagogical approaches, tools and practices to be identified and chosen for the development of the methodology for enhancing comprehension in science teaching and learning.
3. Development of methodology for enhancing comprehension in science education in high schools
Result: The methodology is the corner stone to build and implement a systematic approach for science teaching and learning focused on comprehension and on active student involvement in the educational process. Currently scientific topics are explained through scientific language, which hampers the understanding of kids; their educational success in sciences is mainly related to the word skills of the teachers and their ability to explain. The problem is that no matter how close teachers try to be to the conscious, cognitive and thinking models of kids they usually fail for the fact that the neurological connections in their brains, their experience and knowledge, are very different from these of the kids.
The innovative character of the methodology developed under the project can be found in its main characteristics:
- It focuses on comprehension which is not the central point of the currently used pedagogical tools and practices in sciences, since they focus on the role of the teacher and motivation of students;
- It focuses on active student involvement in the education process – students have to work themselves for the creation of variety of pedagogical tools using their creativity and fantasy;
- It focuses on using associative images, models, art representation of science concepts, which create coherence of the educational content with the comprehension model of students, relating the content to natural and familiar phenomena;
- It requires a process of ensuring scientific relevance of all the created pedagogical tools;
- It will give the teachers the freedom to relate concepts in scientific subjects, which often are situated in different grades in the curricula for students to study, which make students forget and lose the connection between the different knowledge units, which decreases their comprehension and functional literacy and leads to serious underachievement in the science subjects;
- It will makes possible the use of pedagogical tools not necessarily based on language, which allows teachers to address and students to use not only their verbal skills but all their senses, abilities, emotions (thus making the process of understanding and remembering much more effective);
4. Training activities, focused on working with the pedagogical approach/methodology of enhanced comprehension in teaching/learning science in schools
Result: 30 science teachers from the partner counties to be trained. The training activity aims at training science teachers in the developed methodology for enhancing comprehension in science teaching and learning.
5. Research on scientific subjects and concepts to be included in online teaching and learning platform
Result: That activity will lead to identification of the scientific concepts, which will be put in the project online teaching platform. The result will be achieved through discussion among all partners and involved target group representatives (science teachers and students). Research on scientific subjects and concepts to be included in the online platform will be made, so that the concepts correspond to the science curricula in the different EU schools.
6. Development of creative pedagogical tools for enhancing comprehension in science teaching and learning
Result: The pedagogical tools which will be created to support the developed approach and methodology (IO1) will interpret theoretical science concepts by expressing them through familiar phenomena and natural, conventional relation which the student will be able to perceive intuitively through an associative image, video, or a fiction story. The tools will be developed by the students themselves and checked for correctness and scientific relevance by the teachers.
7. Development of an online teaching and learning platform for enhancing comprehension in teaching and learning sciences.
Result: The online tool will allow creation of user generated content as per the individual needs of the teachers and students, who will be the main users. It will contain all project results – methodology and pedagogical tools in particular.
8. Testing and evaluation of the intellectual outputs created
Result: The testing and evaluation will be done both by teachers and students from all involved schools (partners and target groups representatives). The process will give the partnership feedback on the level of applicability, usability, effectiveness and other characteristics of the project results developed and they will be improved according to the received feedback.
9. Organization of multiplier events
Results: one event in each country – Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Spain, Romania, (7 events, as min with 140 participants – 20 participants per country).
