Exploring the potential of evaluation frameworks
Transforming science education to address 21st century challenges is one of the top priorities of our field. Evaluation is a key component to ensure the successful development and application of relevant initiatives. However, it is often perceived by participants as added "turbulence" in their daily practice. As a result, they fail to appreciate or to understand the value and impact of such a process on a personal and institutional level. These struggles call for a more flexible, practical and adjustable evaluation process which accommodates different cultures, participants and needs. In this session, speakers and participants will share experiences and lessons learned from three evaluation frameworks developed and implemented within Open Schooling projects and will suggest instruments and methods that can be employed in the formal and informal sector, not only to evaluate but also to provide practitioners with recommendations to strategically design projects.
This session is sponsored by ATELIER BRÜCKNER as a part of the 21st century skills conference track.
Facilitator
Specialist Teaching Fellow of Science Education
Session speakers
We aim at sharing different instruments, methods and techniques implemented in the context of the School As Living Labs project. These suggestions can be employed not only for evaluating an open-schooling initiative in terms of its impact on participants (e.g. knowledge and skills acquisition) but also as tools that can simultaneously be utilized for multiple purposes within everyday practice; for example, for planning or for reflection purposes we suggest the SWOT analysis as a tool for planning a school project with the collaboration of external stakeholders and for on-going reflection on the goals and steps of the project.
Learning and Engagement Researcher
We aim to share the journey of the OSHub.Network to develop an open and flexible evaluation framework approach that was implemented across various cultures. We will discuss how the OSHub evaluation approach was divided into 3 distinct levels to assess the project's impact on the consortium, the local hubs and the individual learner experiences. We will share the self-iterative process used to design the evaluation tools for an open and equitable experience, and present how investing in an equitable evaluation approach can inform and strengthen multiple aspects of the project.
We will share our research approach in the Make it Open project - an international and multi-stage Open Schooling initiative, which aims to develop an actionable framework. We will discuss how the Proof of Concept methodology used in this project has accommodated the needs of different actors; and considered the challenges linked to the project's specificity, e.g. the different objectives of each phase of the project, time constraints, cultural differences, and various models of collaboration between practice partners and teachers. Finally, we will share the research tools, observations and insights gathered so far in the project.
