Abstract:

At German primary schools, 40 % of all STEM lessons are taught by teachers from other subject areas. 50 % of STEM teachers in primary schools rate their own competences in STEM as insufficient. As a result, teachers fall back on competences and pre-concepts built up during their own school time. Due to the fact that a high-quality early education of children (in the meaning of basic competences and effective pre-concepts) is the foundation for a successful educational biography, the authors of this article identify a demand for further training of practising primary school teachers. In this article, we present a concept for a national training programme to promote experimentation and problem-solving skills among practising teachers. A university research assistant offers hybrid trainings which are divided into six phases.

During the first phase, the teachers inform themselves in groups about a selected technical-scientific phenomenon or problem which is relevant in the curriculum. They form hypotheses about the cause or plan problem solutions. Participation in this phase is enabled in presence or via videoconference. In the second phase, the teachers plan and carry out experiments to confirm hypotheses or implement problem solutions and check them. This phase is self-organised in group work via video conference. The experiments are designed as a remote lab and accessible via a learning system, which enables the teachers to jointly control and evaluate the experiments. The third phase starts with a discussion of the experimental results. Afterwards, the teachers plan a topic-related learning situation for primary school children in their own classes with special attention to learning objectives, experiments and procedure. In this context, the teachers first inform themselves about the didactics regarding experimentation with primary school children. During the fourth phase, the teachers, along with the instructor, develop instruments to measure the impact on the pupils. The aim is to enable the teachers to measure and evaluate the (local) effects of interventions in their own STEM lessons in the meaning of action-research. In the fifth phase, the teachers carry out their planned learning situation with their primary school students and evaluate their actions. The sixth phase takes place online via videoconference, in which the teachers reflect on their lesson with the instructor based on guiding questions and identify optimisation potential for future lessons.

Due to the fact that the teachers have to fulfil their teaching obligations during the day and the participation should also be possible for teachers who do not live in the direct vicinity of the university, we decided to offer the training programme in a hybrid way. As a special feature, we would like to mention the availability of the experiments as remote labs, which enable self-regulated, secure, collaborative and time- and location-independent experimentation. The experiments themselves consist of the same lab materials that are used in school experiments. This facilitates the transferability of remote labs to face-to-face labs.

The first trial of the training programme will take place in the summer semester of 2024.

Keywords:

STEM Training, Remote Labs, Primary School Teachers.