Inspiring Science Education

On 28 April 2015, Dr. Panagiotis Zervas andProf. Demetrios G. Sampsonleaded the Inspiring Science Education webinar titled "Supporting the assessment of problem solving competences through inquiry-based teaching in school science education: The Inspiring Science Education tools".

The webinar was delivered to 47 school teachers from several European Countries, who are members of theeTwinning Creative Classroom Group. The attendees were invited to join the ISE Portal and a dedicated ISE community that is availablehere.

Slides and recording

The slides of the webinar have been uploaded to the resources of this community and they are available here.

The recording of this webinaris now available.You can also find it on the Youtube channel of the Creative Classroom group.

The context

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education is recognized as a top priority for school education worldwide, and, thus, a key challenge for technology-supported andtechnology-enabled school education innovations (Johnson et al., 2012).

As a result, inquiry-based teaching models are recognized as the appropriate teaching strategies to support deep understanding and prepare students to apply their knowledge in novel situations (OECD, 2013). Moreover, inquiry-based teaching strategies promote self-regulated learning and meta-cognition, and develop the cognitive processes that cultivate problem solving (PS) competence (Prince & Felder, 2006).
Problem solving competence is a central objective for most compulsory education (K-12) curricula and a critical competence for both professional career readiness and effective citizenship (Greiff et al.,2014). The acquisition of high levels of problem-solving competence provides students the capacity to think critically and creatively in solving complex real-life problems (Lesh & Zawojewski, 2007). Yet, both developing and assessing problem-solving competences as part of School Education remains an open challenge.

Within this context, the scope of this webinar is to present the design considerations and the implementation of a set of tools which aim to support the authoring and delivery of science education
lessons that follow an inquiry-based teaching strategy (namely, the 5E model) incorporating appropriate (PISA2012 PSF compatible) assessment activities within the various phases of the inquiry teaching model. From this perspective, the proposed tools target to overcome the summative nature of PISA 2012 problem solving competence assessment and its disconnection from the school science
teaching practice. These tools have been developed in the framework of a major European Initiative, namely the, Inspiring Science Education (ISE) Project.