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GRID - Growing Interest in the Development of teaching science

The GRID project intends to create a network for the exchange of best practice in the field of science teaching in Europe at the level of decision-makers and schools directly involved in innovative experiments.

Project aims
The GRID project aims at inventorying, analyzing, experimenting and validating the methods, techniques and best practice to improve scientific teaching at school. Furthermore it aims at disseminating these methods, techniques and best practice at European level with all the relevant means such as conferences, seminars, workshops, publications and websites.

The objectives of the network thus created will be to:
-Inventory national initiatives by creating a compendium of the various activities carried out in the current and future member states of the European Union such as analytical reports, recommendations, action plans, etc. through comparative analysis of all the actions;
-Identify local experiments under development, through a catalogue of all the experiments carried out in current and future member states of the European Union;
-Make available to decision-makers and the involved schools a virtual exchange and discussion space by developing a virtual community for cooperative work;
-Choose a limited number of experiments and capitalize on them by organizing work seminars, gathering decision-makers and schools, in order to enhance practice exchange and identify some operation patterns which could be diffused on a large scale;
-Contribute to the writing of a memorandum on the obstacles generated by the upgrading of science teaching at school. The memorandum will be based upon former works and two surveys concerning decision-makers on the one hand and a sample of European schools on the other hand;
-Implement dissemination actions on a large scale.

The project is divided into five specific work-packages:
1 Management of the project;
2 Inventory, comparative analysis, identification of existing experiments: the objective is to identify all the financed national reports, observations and recommendations concerning the improvement of science teaching at school. This inventory work will be carried out in all European and associated states. In the same way, this work-package aims at identifying all the experiments which have been implemented in some schools. In terms of production, the main deliverable will be the catalogue of national reports/recommendations and a catalogue of the initiated experiments. The set of two catalogues will be available in a database with multiquery search functions. Along with these two major productions, a comparative analysis of the situation in all the European and associated countries will be written;
3 Selection of national experiments and realization of case studies: in each partner country - Belgium, France, UK, Hungary, Italy, Finland and Ireland - one or two experiments will be selected  and some case studies will be carried out in order to maximize what already exists and diffuse it on a large scale to share the best practices identified;
4 Development of web portal and implementation of a large-scale dissemination policy;
5 Evaluation.

Partners
The project is coordinates by the Pôle Universitaire Européen de Lorraine, France. The other partners are:
-Amitié, Italy, 
-EDUCONSULT, Belgium, 
-LUMA Centre - Department of Applied Sciences of Education, Faculty of Behaviourial Sciences - University of Helsinki, Finland,
-National Institute of Public Education - Research Centre, Hungary, -University of Bradford - School of Informatics, UK,
-Waterford Institute of Technology – CALMAST, Ireland.

The project is funded by the European Commission within the Socrates Programme.

For more information visit the project website: http://www.amitie.it/grid/en/index.htm