Abstract
The Effecting Principled Improvement in STEM Education [epiSTEMe] project undertook pedagogical research aimed at improving pupil engagement and learning in early secondary school physical science and mathematics. Using principles identified as effective in the research literature and drawing on a range of existing pedagogical resources, the project designed and trialled a classroom intervention, with associated professional development, in a form intended to be suited to implementation at scale. The most distinctive feature of the epiSTEMe pedagogical approach is its inclusion of a component of dialogic teaching. Aimed at the first year of secondary education in English schools (covering ages 11–12), the epiSTEMe intervention consists of a short introductory module designed to prepare classes for this dialogic teaching component, and topic modules which employ the epiSTEMe pedagogical approach to cover two curricular topics in each of science and mathematics. A field trial was conducted over the 2010/2011 school year in 25 volunteer schools, randomly assigned to intervention and control groups. Within the intervention group, observation of lessons indicated that the level of dialogic teaching was higher for one of the topic modules than others. Evaluation focused on the effectiveness of the topic modules, each trialled in more than 10 classes containing a total of over 300 pupils, and compared with a group of similar composition. Overall, at this first implementation, learning gains under the epiSTEMe intervention were no greater, although for individual topic modules the effects ranged from small negative to small positive. No difference was found between intervention and control groups either in the opinion of pupils about their classroom experience or in changes in their attitude towards subjects.
Highlights
Improving the quality and effectiveness of school science and mathematics education has been a prominent goal of educational policy in many countries since the international initiatives of the early 1960s (Kilpatrick 2012)
The Effecting Principled Improvement in STEM Education [epiSTEMe] project undertook pedagogical research aimed at improving pupil engagement and learning in early secondary school physical science and mathematics
Aimed at the first year of secondary education in English schools, the epiSTEMe intervention consists of a short introductory module designed to prepare classes for this dialogic teaching component, and topic modules which employ the epiSTEMe pedagogical approach to cover two curricular topics in each of science and mathematics
Summary
Improving the quality and effectiveness of school science and mathematics education has been a prominent goal of educational policy in many countries since the international initiatives of the early 1960s (Kilpatrick 2012). While the project team could provide supplementary professional development sessions to accommodate this situation, nothing could be done to address a potential threat to validity which arose from decisions about participating teachers and classes being modified, or established for the first time, by schools after they had been randomly assigned to a condition: namely the risk of bias being introduced through decision-making at school level being influenced by this assignment This pointed to the importance of establishing, as a preliminary to later analysis, whether the treatment groups were equivalent through examining the initial standing of the participating classes, and of taking appropriate mitigating action if not. The Probability module appears to have been more successful than the others in supporting dialogic teaching, in terms both of generating the full range of dialogic markers and of doing so consistently across lessons
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