STEM education at Deakin

Russell Tytler

Professor of Science Education

Marginson, S., Tytler, R., Freeman, B., & Roberts, K. (2013). STEM: Country comparisons. Melbourne: The Australian Council of Learned Academies. www.acola.org.au.

Lessons from strong performing countries

• Work to increase status of mathematics and science teachers through career pathway provision based on performance in teaching and disciplinary leadership

• Increase commitment to disciplinary strength of teachers – eliminate out of field incidence, develop discipline focused PD.

• Maintain and extend the focus on reform of classroom practice based on inquiry, problem solving, creativity (incorporate art & design?).

• Strong focus on under represented groups (low SES, Indigenous, remote).

• Renewed focus on gender participation

Vision of the Chief Scientist• To bring school science and mathematics practices closer to the

practice of professionals working in the field

Re-imagining Science Education: Foreword by Jim Peacock:The way in which I learned science at school does not meet the needs of today’s students. In my lifetime, scientific research has broadened from an individual- oriented approach to team-based work and collaboration with other researchers and industry. … A different skills set is needed in today’s scientists.

School science education is operating in a world where students ‘connect’ to students thousands of kilometres away in real time through instant messaging and they can escape to virtual internet worlds. Traditional science education is not fruitful in such an environment.

Science is a constantly evolving field. Thus, much of the content knowledge I learned in school and university was not directly used in my career as a plant scientist.

Science Education research at Deakin

• REMSTEP – Reconceptualising Mathematics and Science Teacher Education to reflect contemporary science practices.

• RILS – the Role of Representation in Learning Science

• CRISP – Working with teachers to explore the implementation of a guided inquiry pedagogy based on representation construction. Teacher learning focus.

• iSTELR – developing a digital pedagogy based on representation construction

• PRIMSS – a program to support specialist teachers of primary science. Teacher and school change processes.

• Teaching across subject boundaries (TASB) – working with schools to identify ways of supporting teachers teaching outside their area of expertise.

• STEPS (Science Teacher Education Partnerships with Schools). Developed a partnership model for how universities (and other groups) can work with schools

Deakin’s Institute of Frontier Materials (IFM)• PhD students paired with chemistry teacher education students

to develop resources based on current research

• Working with scientists and PhD students to generate digital resources for use with teacher education students and schools. This will include: Video representations of the work of IFM Video of a carbon fibre researcher practicing and explaining their

problem and approaches Activities to exemplify the problem solving and also the conceptual

content of the research – structure and properties of composite materials

Dimensions of STEM practice

• The links between scientific materials research and engineering design

• The way scientists deal with real problems (e.g. corrosion in buried pipes) by isolating key features (material composition, nature of environment)

• The successive refinement of the problem and understandings through shaping of experimental conditions (modeling and refining the real world condition)

• Modeling and representing multi modally at macro, meso and micro levels

• Devising instrumentation to measure the material properties

• Progressively developing more abstract, mathematical models

• Developing explanations involving material structure by developing sub-micro level models, and instruments such as electron microscopy.

Modelling material behaviourMulti-scale Modelling

Summative assessment provided opportunities for students to generate and interpret representations.

Nearly all our subjects now are big scrapbooks. Because, and we explained to the parents at the start of the year, if you expect your students to come home with big neat books, then you’re in the wrong school.

CRISP: Working with teams of teachers

• Workshop on inquiry teaching through representation construction

• Planning meeting to discuss topic and resources. Strong focus on the science concepts and representations.

• Pre- (and post-) test – online for laptop schools.

• Video capture by teachers of key lessons and discussion of teaching and learning strategies.

• Support for further planning meetings

• Collect student work. Interviews with students and teachers.

Mathematics education

• Student resilience and optimism – Gaye Williams

• Teacher professional learning through lesson study approaches – collaborative lesson planning – Susie Groves, Colleen Vale

• Student reasoning in mathematics

• Teacher noticing- Wanty Widjaja, Jun Li, LiHua Xu