Le rapport du projet Inspire, financé par la Communauté Européenne, vient d’être publié sur Insight, l’observatoire des nouvelles technologies et éducation du portail European Schoolnet.
Le thème de Inspire est le suivant: Motivating students for Maths, science & technology using learning resources.
“Since 2007, Ministries of Education have seen Maths, Science and Technology (MST) as one of the major thematic domains in which European Schoolnet (EUN) should play a role at European level. More than 15 different projects are currently running in the MST area, including awareness-raising campaigns in schools in specific subjects, policy studies, and validation projects…
A further project connected to MST was the Learning Resource Exchange (LRE), which was launched by EUN at the end of 2008. This activity has been monitored through the LRE Working Group and more work is foreseen in 2010 to improve the quality of LRE resources, including the new eQNet project funded by the Commission’s Lifelong Learning programme. The main aim for 2010 is to provide all teachers in Europe with an LRE service that will not only allow them to access digital resources from different Ministries of Education but also to participate in a variety of communities and learning events…
The Inspire project has been conducted and completed in line with the steps necessary to make MST more attractive among young people in Europe. This successful project has taken into account the fact that the driving forces of changes in MST education are teachers and it is of key importance to provide them with new tools and new approaches. In this sense, Inspire aimed at promoting the use of digital learning resources (also known as Learning Resources, or LR) in MST education but without forgetting the importance of testing and validating new ideas, methods and technologies to ensure the targets are met. And lastly, one should never forget to share and mainstream good results, which is the aim of the present report….
The Lisbon Declaration of March 2000 (Lisbon 2000) brought into the spotlight the need to increase the
number of students going for careers in Maths, Science and Technology (Durando, Wastiau & Joyce 2009).
Additional studies have highlighted the lack of interest of students in MST and ICT, especially among women
(Sjøberg & Schreiner, 2008; Gras-Velázquez, Joyce & Debry, 2009), and the need to correct this situation
and increase the numbers of MST graduates if Europe is to avoid the reduction of human resources in MST
having an impact in the labour market in the near future (ERT, 2009). More precisely, one of the five EU
benchmarks for 2010 is an Increase of at least 15% in the number of tertiary graduates in Mathematics,
Science and Technology (MST), with a simultaneous decrease in the gender imbalance (Commission of the
European Communities, 2008)….
Osborne and Dillon 2008 and Rocard 2007, among others, suggest that developing and extending the ways
in which science is taught is essential for improving student engagement and that a reversal of school
science-teaching pedagogy from mainly deductive to inquiry-based, ‘hands-on’ and other innovative methods
is necessary if we are to increase interest in science (Kearney, Gras-Velázquez & Joyce, 2009)…
To contribute to the research on the effects of using learning resources in classes, the Inspire (Innovative Science Pedagogy in Research and Education) project set up a validation observatory where 62 schools in Europe tested and analysed the use of LR in the field of MST over a defined period of time. Through this experimentation, special attention was given to the impact of these LR at the level of pupils and their motivation, the analysis of the pre-requisites to be defined for enabling the teachers to integrate them in their pedagogy and the critical success factors to be mastered at the level of the teacher and the school for the generalization of such practices.“
Parmi les ressources citées et utilisées par les enseignants, il faut signaler :
e-chalk: activités éducatives, jeux, simulations, puzzles créés pour apprendre en s’amusant, mais conçus spécifiquement pour l’utilisation en classe et pensés pour fonctionner avec les tableaux blancs interactifs et la projection.
BBC Science clips (pour enfants de 5 à 11 ans)
“Teachers who used the LRs were invited to state which specific elements had been included in the pedagogical approach they had used while using the learning resources. The teachers could choose from the elements which are the key elements of the Inquiry-Based Science Education (IBSE) approach as defined in national action plans or initiatives such as the French “La main à la Pâte” initiative which is now generalized across all primary schools and also largely in lower secondary schools in France. The key elements from the IBSE approach are :
Raising the interest and curiosity of the pupils for a scientific problem or challenge; Moving from the state of curiosity towards an educational process; inviting pupils to express in words what the problem is about; Giving explicit pedagogical action to move from the definition of the problem to planning an inquiry-based process; Implementing inquiry-based process activities planned by setting up tests, experiments making use of the ICT based tools / techniques; Confronting the results with the reality; comparing the concrete results or outcomes with the expected results. Organising an individual or collective validation of the outcomes; Drawing conclusions highlighting what scientific knowledge has been acquired; possible links are made with new scientific problems; Finding out how the use of ICT based tools / techniques has facilitated the whole process; Making the link between science and ethics, technology, (political) decision-making, the making of choices. ” (p. 13)
Voici les résultats sur les 62 écoles impliquées dans le projet, 190 enseignants, 3411 étudiants :
“77% found the resources made it easier for students to understand and learn MST;
Nearly three quarters of the teachers found that the LR stimulated their own interest and
motivation for teaching MST;
73% said the LR increased the pupils’ understanding and use of ICT in general;
Around two thirds of the teachers noticed that the LR stimulated pupils’ interest and motivation
for learning MST (70%);
They also experienced that thanks to the LR their own interest for teaching MST using LR
increased (66%) and that the LR facilitated differentiated teaching of sciences in the classroom
(64%);
63% of the teachers experienced that the LR helped students link science to everyday life more
easily;
52% found that they made the pupils better understand tests and experiments carried out in labs
or developed pupils’ ability to use scientific methods. ” (p. 14-15)
En ce qui concerne les élèves :
“66% of the boys and 58% of the girls found it easy to study MST by themselves at their own
pace.
60% percent of the boys and 52% of the girls agree that MST lessons are organized in such a
way that it is easy to study and remember what they have learned.” (p. 16)
Il est à remarquer que :
“there seems to be no clear correlation between the number of resources and their effects. This could mean that the fact of using a resource has effects on the students’
motivation, but there seems to be no risk of using “too many” resources. A number of classes used over ten resources, and their results did not differ from those of classes that used only one, either by age or by
gender.” (p. 18-19)