Abstract:

The main objective of this project is to foster the S&T vocation among the European young students (12 to 18 years old). According to PISA 2006, the interest and enjoyment of S&T is positively associated with better performance, so it is expected that the increase in the motivation towards S&T will also contribute to the improvement and development of key competences in S&T among the European young students, and to their scientific literacy.
STIMULA project strategy is to bring S&T closer to the young students and at the same time the students closer to S&T, through bidirectional collaborative initiatives between schools and agents of the world of work.

• Bring S&T to schools, through the proposal and practical implementation of curriculum extending S&T educational initiatives (in the form of live experiments and competitions based on problems). They have carried out in the classrooms, promoting team work, creativity and ICT skills.
• Take schools to S&T, through the definition of collaboration strategies, models and programmes of the schools with agents of the world of work (universities, R&D centres and companies).
• Additionally, the project has proposed specific best practice teaching methods and programmes, addressed to current and future S&T technology teachers, so that they can contribute to effectively foster the S&T vocation on young students.

Operative objectives
Finally, the operative objectives of the project leading to the achievement of the specific objectives of the project are the following:
• To gain a better understanding and measure the perception of S&T among European young students, in order to set an improved pedagogical basis for S&T education.
• Based on the previous study, to develop different measures to increase the S&T vocation, and to improve the acquisition of scientific key competences among young students. This includes:
• Defining S&T teachers training methodologies, to improve the S&T teaching skills and knowledge of S&T teachers at schools building links between them and the world of work.
• To design a collaboration programme between schools and the outside scientific world (research centres and universities mainly).
• To design several Curriculum-Extending educational activities to be carried out within the classroom, based on experimentation and problem solving, with the objective of increasing the interest about S&T, the creativity and the team work skills among young students.
• To validate the developed measures through several pilot projects carried out at schools where the results of the project will be tested in real life conditions.
• To extract the conclusions of the project and to elaborate guidelines and best practices in order to allow an adequate transmission of the project achievements to the European education community.

More than 1000 students from different European countries have participated in the pilots (science experiments, science contests and visits to technological centres), and the perception of Science and Technology have been measured in pre and post-tests.

http://stimula-project.eu

Call: LIFELONG LEARNING PROGRAMME Centralized / COMENIUS Multilateral projects / EAC/49/2010 (European Commission,EACEA)

Keywords:

Science, experiments, contests, visits, methodologies, best practices, perception.