Knowledge, beliefs, Perceptions about Science of European Students Erasmus Project

Project Title

Knowledge, beliefs, Perceptions about Science of European Students

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Environment and climate change; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Health and wellbeing

Project Summary

– Context of the project: Persist_EU is an Erasmus+ project, co-funded by the European Commission, that aims to evaluate the knowledge, beliefs and perceptions on scientific issues of European university students in five countries: Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany and Slovakia, as well as providing with an ICT tool for teachers and science communicators to evaluate their activities.
Attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and trust seem to have a greater impact on decision making than factual knowledge. Therefore, understanding how EU student opinions are formed and how we can improve their scientific literacy in order to allow them to participate more actively in the design of public health or environmental campaigns or programs is key for the promotion of a more democratic European Union.
– Objectives:
1. To produce an ICT based assessment method for the teaching of science among University students that might be applicable in the future for any teaching activity and potentially to any educational level. The platform will be also useful for science communicators.
2. To improve the knowledge for science social appropriation of University students across the EU on specific topics of substantial social influence: climate change, vaccines, the use of CAMs, phytosanitary strategies and food safety.
3. To analyze the regional, gender-related and cultural differences of University students in regards to their science social appropriation. For that purpose, the activities will be carried out in five different EU countries, two central European (Germany, Slovakia) and three south European nations (Portugal, Spain, and Italy). Therefore, we ensure to cover differences related to socio-geo-political issues.
– Number and profile of participants:
The activities of the project involved different types of participants.
Learning, Teaching and Training activities (LTTA): 16 participants including IT experts, teachers, sociologist, science communicators and training developers.
ScienceCamps: 572 university students from 5 different European countries (Germany, Slovakia, Spain, Portugal and Italy). 473 of which tested the online platform.
Multiplier events (ME): 500 participants, including University students, teachers, researchers, science communicators.
Description of undertaken activities:
LTTA, oriented towards training the personnel of the different organisations participating in the project. It allowed preparing the transnational activities to evaluate the ICT platform as an assessment method and designing in a co-creative way the ICT platform itself. The scientific partners shared their desired features and the technical partners fixed the bar for what is achievable in the set time frame of the project and presented the partners the available options.
ScienceCamps: in order to know the origin of the ideas and values of the students around topics of great relevance and social impacts such as climate change, genetically-modified organisms, or alternative therapies, different activities were carried out in five European countries (Spain, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and Slovakia). These activities were called Persist_EU ScienceCamps and, in total 575 students participated, voluntarily, offering their point of view to generate knowledge about beliefs and perceptions of great value for the future construction of the EU.
ScienceCamps are divided in two parts, A first part of receiving information about the different topics, through short videos and talks held by experts in each topic and a second participatory part consisting of a Q&A section, a discussion for finding arguments in favour or against a sentence presented for each topic and a final debate among the students.
ME: the different ME were the closing events for the project as well as the presentation of the project results. They allowed the dissemination of the project results and the generation of connections to ensure the suistainability of the project.
-Results and impact attained:
ICT tool for the assessment of natural and social science teaching activities. The ICT tool developed allows to assess the initial knowledge of European students when configuring their beliefs and perceptions on different scientific topics and also the changes undergone during their participation in the project activities.
A digital book and country reports with the methodology of the project, indications to use the ICT tool and an analysis of the science social appropriation of European University students on science-related hot-topics (climate change, vaccines use, complementary therapies, GMOs) that have a significant impact in EU day-to-day life and policy.
The intellectual outputs created and the different activities resulted in an improvement of the transnational relations among partners, an improvement of the scientific literacy of the student’s participating in the activities and an improvement of the appreciation of science by the student participant in the activities.

Project Website

https://persist.erasmus.site/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 231440 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITAT DE VALENCIA & Country: ES

Project Partners

• TRNAVSKA UNIVERZITA V TRNAVE
• OBSERVA ASSOCIAZIONE
• INSTITUTO DE CIENCIAS SOCIAIS
• DANMAR COMPUTERS SP ZOO
• INSTALOFI LEVANTE SL
• KARLSRUHER INSTITUT FUER TECHNOLOGIE