Essential experiences in science: addressing the gap in primary enquiry-based practical science created by lockdown and aiding school recovery.

Project Description

Focusing on primary science education, we will identify and disseminate strategies to enable UK schools and organisations to increase resilience and counter the impacts of lockdown particularly for disadvantaged* students (*see section 4.3).
The Epistemic Insight Curriculum Framework underpins research by hundreds of practitioners in schools and Initial Teacher Education (see www.epistemicinsight.com). Designed to raise teacher confidence and expertise in science education and action research, it summarises UK curriculum expectations for scientific enquiry and literacy and provides tools to track children’s progress. Accompanying resources and CPD embed these objectives and tools into hands-on science activities, cross-disciplinary investigations and real-world problem-solving. These established tools and methods will be used here to discover best practice and to test the efficacy of interventions on children's enquiry skills, scientific literacy, science capital, academic self-concept and attitudes to learning. Validated questionnaires will be used in quasi-experimental studies focusing on core variables of interest and pre-post surveys (Gopalan, et al., 2020). We describe and interpret naturally occurring variations in the baseline data and also changes over time where subjects act as their own controls. As the interventions will be tailored for multiple settings, we use linear multilevel models to model these differences as a random factor (Goldstein, 2003). Based on effect sizes established in our previous studies, we believe that our target sample sizes will be more than adequate to detect the effect sizes of interest, even if we face modest dropout. Qualitative work will analyse survey comments and interview studies with children, parents and teachers.