Effecting Principled Improvement in STEM Education
Project Summary
The epiSTEMe project runs between August 2008 and January 2013. It is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council as part of the Targeted Initiative on Science and Mathematics Education (TISME).
Many students in secondary school find that physical science and mathematics lack interest and are difficult to learn with understanding. This leaves important gaps in their education and narrows the range of careers open to them. The epiSTEMe project is redesigning key aspects of the teaching of these subjects to improve this situation.
The project has developed a principled approach to teaching and learning mathematics and science that draws on insights from several social scientific fields – concerned with conceptual growth, identity formation, classroom dialogue, collaborative learning, and relations between everyday and formal understanding. These principles have guided the design of an intervention suitable for widespread use in normal school settings.
During the school years 2008/09 and 2009/10 the epiSTEMe research team worked with teachers from several schools to develop, trial and refine a teaching intervention specifically focused on the first year of lower-secondary education. This is known to be a crucial period in the formation of student attitudes towards school subjects as well as their study and career aspirations.
The epiSTEMe intervention has been designed to be capable of being implemented at scale across the educational system as a whole. The intervention comprises a 2-day training programme for teachers, plus supporting material for around 20-hours of classroom-based activity through which teachers and students are inducted into the epiSTEMe approach to teaching and learning. The modules focus on two key curricular topics in each subject: in mathematics, these topics are fractions, ratio & proportion, and probability; in science, forces and electricity. These topic modules provide exemplars of the epiSTEMe approach that could be extended to cover the full course of lower-secondary education.
The development process has been a rigorous, research-based one. Its aim has been to generate tried-and-tested resources for training teachers and teaching students, as well as to improve understanding of teaching and learning processes in school science and mathematics. In particular, the research team has designed, trialled and refined a versatile suite of research instruments for analysing classroom interaction, examining student attitudes and assessing student learning. These have been used to gather evidence to underpin a systematic evaluation of the epiSTEMe intervention in action.
For the school year 2010/11, the project recruited a further 25 schools (from Lincolnshire in the north to Hackney in the south, from Northamptonshire in the west to the Essex coast in the east) to conduct a randomised field trial of the intervention. Schools that applied to participate in the field trial were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. Teachers in the intervention group completed the training programme at the start of the 2010/11 school year, and then undertook the epiSTEMe modules with their Year 7 classes. Teachers in the control group had to wait until the start of the 2011/12 school year to undertake the training.
Over the course of the 2010/11 year, a range of data was collected from around 80 participating Year 7 classes and their teachers. This is being used to compare outcomes from the first implementation of the epiSTEMe approach by teachers in the intervention group with the outcomes produced by the current practice of teachers in the control group. Findings from the evaluation are expected to be available for dissemination by early 2013. (The lag time is because some major aspects of the analysis await the return from maternity leave of the research associate concerned).
If the results of the evaluation justify doing so, both the classroom materials and the training programme comprising the epiSTEMe intervention will then be made more widely available. The project also expects to produce research papers reporting on the design, operation and evaluation of the intervention as a whole and of individual modules, and on the conceptualisation, operationalisation and implementation of the dialogic teaching approach which has a key place in the intervention.
Project Information
Investigators
Kenneth Ruthven
Christine Howe
Neil Mercer
Keith Taber
Research Associates
Riikka Hofmann
Stefanie Luthman
Publications
Conference presentations and publications are available for download below:
Effecting Principled Improvement in STEM Education: Research-based pedagogical development for student engagement and learning in early secondary-school physical science and mathematics. Paper
Research-informed pedagogical innovation at scale in school mathematics and science education. Paper
Developing a principled and effective pedagogy: The epiSTEMe experience of redesigning classroom teaching and learning in lower-secondary-school mathematics and science. Paper
A dialogic approach to plenary problem synthesis. Paper
Links
ESRC (Grant Number: RES-179-25-0003)