| Introduction
STTIS
is a cross-national project, which was funded by the EU Commission
under
the TSER
(Targeted
Socio-Economic Research) program for the period December 1997- February
2001.
The project's main
objective is to investigate science
teachers' transformations of educational innovations.
Small-scale
intensive studies in the participant countries (France, Italy, Norway,
Spain and UK) have resulted in the elaboration of some rules of
transformation
of innovation and in the development of relevant materials for teacher
training.
STTIS research in the
UK falls within the following three
distinct but related areas, and there is a research report for each
area.
-
Using
informatic tools - the nature
of the use made by science teachers of informatic tools such as
computational
modelling and simulation;
-
Reading
images - the difficulties involved
in teaching and learning graphic representations such as the ones that
appear in popular science textbooks on the topic of energy;
-
Implementing
curriculum innovation
- the transformations which occur when teachers implement innovative
teaching
strategies, such as the change from 'transforming' to 'transferring'
energy
which first appeared in the recommendations for the teaching of energy
of the 1989 Science National Curriculum for England and Wales and the
smaller
scale innovation introduced by the 'Energy and Change'
project.
As part of the STTIS research,
each of the participant countries
has produced workshop
materials to support
the training of teachers in using the innovations. For the UK there are
two sets of workshop materials:
In the UK, the STTIS research
was carried out by Prof. Jon
Ogborn (Co-ordinator of STTIS in the UK) and Fani
Stylianidou (Research Fellow) at the Institute of Education,
University
of Sussex. Richard
Boohan (The
Open University) acted as a consultant on the writing of the workshop
materials. |
