Abstract:

The Global Online Science Labs for Inquiry Learning at School (Go-Lab) is a European project, co-funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission during 2012-2016. The consortium consisted of 19 partners from 11 European Countries (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, UK). The project addresses the challenge of modernizing science teaching in secondary education schools by introducing and implementing the use of online labs and inquiry learning approaches and by proposing and offering an integrated framework of methods and tools that are freely available to science teachers and educators. The project was implemented in 3 phases at more than 1000 schools with the participation of several thousand teachers and students in 15 countries across Europe and beyond. In this paper we first describe the objectives of the “Go-Lab” project and discuss the methodology for diffusion of online labs and of inquiry-based science teaching methods and practices across the participating European countries. The quantitative results and qualitative outcomes of the methods adopted are also presented in detail.

Keywords:

Inquiry-based science education, large-scale implementation in schools, best practices, communities of practice, online science labs, inquiry learning.