Early Years Science Education – pre- and in-service teachers

Description

The seminar will discuss results from ongoing research projects on early-years science education focusing pre- and in-service preschool teachers.

* Professional Development of Early Years Science Teaching in Preschool – A Research Project in Collaboration
We analyse a municipality’s experiences of partaking in a professional development programme called Science Kids. The research is done in cooperation with a mid-sized Swedish municipality, and empirical data is collected in terms of pre- and post-questionnaires, focus-group discussions, and interviews. The study is ongoing, and results and discussion related to current and future science teaching in preschool will be presented during the seminar.

* Science and thematic teaching in preschool – pre- and in-service teachers’ expressed curriculum emphases during joint planning sessions
A project on student preschool teachers’ and in-service preschool teachers’ planning discussions about thematic teaching, including science, during the student teachers’ degree projects. The analysis presented here focuses on expressed aims for science teaching in relation to science curriculum emphases and ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ perspectives. We will discuss possible causes and implications for pre- and in-service teacher education.

* botSTEM – Robotics and STEM education for children and primary schools
An ERASMUS+ project on inquiry-based collaborative learning and robots-enhanced education. botSTEM tested robot-based approaches, including code-learning, for enhancing education in Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM).

Period	2025-Apr-09
Held at	University of the Balearic Islands, Spain