Science Education for Diversity
1 March 2010 - 28 February 2013
PI/s in Exeter: Professor Rupert Wegerif
CI/s in Exeter: Associate Professor Alexandra Allan Associate Professor Lindsay Hetherington Dr Nasser Mansour Dr Fran Martin Dr Alun Morgan Associate Professor Keith Postlethwaite Dr Nigel Skinner
Research partners: with Marchmont; Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India; Pamukkale University, Turkey; American University in Beirut, Lebanon; Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands; Tunku Abdul Rahman College, Malaysia
Funding awarded: £ 350,000 (total funding of £ 875,000)
Sponsor(s): European Commission FP7
Project webpage(s)
Science Education for Diversity
About the research
The Science Education for Diversity (SED) project commenced in January 2010 and ran until December 2012. The partners engaged in the work sought to improve the quality of science education in Europe through transnational collaboration. The ultimate aim being to understand how countries in both Europe (England/Netherlands) and the partner countries of India, Turkey, Lebanon and Malaysia were addressing the issue of gender and cultural diversity in regard to engaging young people in science education.
The project carried out a very extensive research exercise across all of the partner countries, based upon questionnaires with teachers and pupils, interviews and focus groups with pupils and one-to-one interviews with teachers. The results from this have been, at times, surprising and have been used to establish a framework within which each partner country is trialling more effective programmes and materials to support children's engagement with science education.
This final series of trials and results is being published through papers, journals and books. All outputs from the project are available on the project website.
The project has now finished but publications will be forthcoming for a number of years and the very large dataset established will continue to be a resource for partners for many years to come