OSMoSIS – Open Schooling: Motivating Students’ Interest in Science

Leading team

Project members

Summary

The primary goal of OSMoSIS is to develop, implement, and test a model for the open schooling of science studies in middle schools (7th grade), aimed at raising students’ interest in science and in the possibilities of future employment provided by science education. The open schooling model, which will be developed by OSMoSIS, will motivate learning and institutional collaboration through direct student engagement with a set of “Grand Challenges” (GCs): generational challenges that all humanity now faces, spanning cultural, geographic, and socio-economic boundaries and informed by social priorities and perspectives which exceed the scope of science. Engagement with these GCs will serve as the primary motivation of science studies and lesson design. Unlike traditional instruction (which typically organizes curricula by disciplinary topics) or conventional “socio-scientific issues” instruction (which typically emphasizes learning via pre-prepared case studies), The new model emphasizes real-time community engagements, and select content informed by the student’s actual requirements as established through their engagement with GCs.
In order to restructure science instruction around student engagement with GCs, OSMoSIS will introduce three main components:

  1. Curricula emphasizing GCs, iteratively redesigned according to student and teacher feedback.
  2. Engagement with a variety of stakeholders.
  3. Professional development of science teachers.

The project will foster common goals and collaborations between schools, teachers, parents, and students, as well as engaging non-school entities (such as NGOs, commercial enterprises, informal science education organizations and other civil organizations,) involved in activities related to the GCs by leveraging the expertise and perspectives of various collaborators. In addition, policy-makers will be recruited to support the project, securing its footing and guaranteeing its sustainability. The project aims to achieve the following objectives in relation to critical stakeholder groups:

  • Transforming schools into sustainable community hubs that connect students, teachers, parents, and non-school entities around a common goal – fostering the interest and engagement of students with science, and promoting awareness of science-related professions.
  • Encouraging parents and families to become involved as a source of valuable cultural, economic, and values-oriented perspectives that are critical to learning and teaching about GCs and the ways societies address them. Through such involvement, families will become both better informed and more actively engaged in children’s formal science education.
  • Helping teachers gain professional knowledge, skills and experience in the following:
  1. Organizing and structuring instruction around curricula informed by GCs;
  2. Constructing and distributing instructional sequences from an online repository of educational resources related to the GCs;
  3. Coordinating activities with parents and non-school entities.
  • Encouraging NGOs, commercial enterprises and other civil organizations to expand their public outreach by engaging directly with schools, students and their parents, and providing opportunities for students and parents to contribute to the goals of these organizations.
  • Encouraging policy-makers to actively support these school-based hubs by assisting in their formation and maintenance. These policy-makers will also consider changes to science teaching standards and concerns in order to restructure middle school science education so that it is centered around GCs.
  • Perhaps most importantly: cultivating students’ interest in science and their appreciation for its potential, importance and ubiquity in their lives, and the wide range of employment opportunities it provides, all while acquiring profound knowledge of core scientific ideas and gaining experience and skill in applying this knowledge in order to grasp meaningful and relevant phenomena. These students will eventually developing a lasting self-reliance as individuals capable of engaging with science and contributing to solutions for the most important challenges facing society, today and in the future.