Final Report Summary - CARBOSCHOOLS+ (European network of regional projects for school partnerships on climate change research)
Executive Summary:
CARBOSCHOOLS+ was a contribution to equipping European Union (EU) education systems with new tools, methods and resources for promoting inquiry based and society based science education in a perspective of sustainable development, through the challenge of climate change.
Initiated by research projects on the carbon cycle, CARBOSCHOOLS+ linked researchers from several leading carbon science laboratories with secondary schools. In these partnerships, young Europeans conducted experiments on the impact of greenhouse gases and learned about climate research and the reduction of emissions. Scientists and teachers cooperated over several months to give young people practical experience of research through true investigations, interactions with real scientists and public presentations.
From January 2008 to December 2010, nine research institutes in seven countries explored how they could best motivate, initiate and support such partnerships at the regional level across a wide variety of contexts, topics and age-groups. European cooperation made it possible to compare results, learn from each other and develop replicable good practice. In total, more than 90 schools were involved in this 'educational laboratory', exploring a whole range of experiments and project activities, evaluating them and publishing them on the project's online library of resources.
An in-depth evaluation study gave a very interesting and challenging picture of the project's impact on participating students. Students were very positive about the CARBOSCHOOLS+ project, which made them more interested in science careers (in particular girls) and more aware of the importance of climate change research for society. In the same time, in the surveyed groups CARBOSCHOOLS+ activities did not counteract the natural decline observed with students attitudes towards science and school science at teenage. This contrasting picture between participants' satisfaction and prevailing declining attitudes suggested that activities like CARBOSCHOOLS+, which teachers reported as heavily constrained and limited by timetables, curricula and other structural factors, would need more emphasis in order to impact attitudes.
A final publication 'Global change: From research to the classroom' coupled with the 'http://www.carboschools.org' website were the legacy of this educational experiment to the broader educational community in Europe and beyond. The book and an online library of resources (experiments, activities and project ideas) gave interested teachers concrete ideas and advice to make science learning more engaging, challenging and attractive and to encourage pupils to experience their global impact on the earth system and how they could help restore the balance.
Project context and objectives:
Motivation and origin
Climate change, the 'greatest uncontrolled scientific experiment of human history' and one of the biggest scientific challenges of the 21st century, is on the frontline daily. People directly feel and widely recognise it. It has become one of the most widespread societal issues where progressing our understanding through scientific research is critical to our children's future. CARBOSCHOOLS+ wanted to inspire the generation that would be most affected by our choices and actions.
CARBOSCHOOLS+ was an initiative of European climate change scientists to fulfil their moral and contractual obligation to convey their research results to the public, in particular young people. It was initiated in 2004 as a pilot educational network by CarboEurope and CarboOcean, two large Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) integrated research projects investigating the carbon cycle on land and ocean respectively. After three years of progress leading to a well-defined concept, a first set of educational resources and an active network of enthusiastic scientists and teachers, CARBOSCHOOLS+ became ready in 2007 for a new phase of structured development which became the purpose of this Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project funded by science in society.
In a rather original way compared to a majority of international climate change education projects mostly based on delivering facts and data through the internet, CARBOSCHOOLS+ was first and foremost based on human contact and on placing scientific issues in their wider social and citizenship context. Young people were overwhelmed with information about climate change and many were alarmed by the shock tactics of media, but they were not overwhelmed with offers of meaningful activities in their school education or with personal connections with real scientists working on a topic which remained fascinating and tremendously concerning and graphically illustrated first-hand the uncertainty of science.
Concept and educational objectives
The basic idea of CARBOSCHOOLS+ was to promote direct partnerships between secondary school teachers and global change scientists for young people to learn about climate change, gain a positive experience of scientific research and act locally to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The two main goals were to re-activate students' interest for science and scientific studies and to equip them with basic understanding of this major scientific challenge and its interaction with the society.
The strength of partnership projects was to involve pupils in a process over several weeks or months, or even years, built on a direct relationship between scientists and teachers to enable young people to gain practical experience of research. The stakes here were no longer only to inform or transfer knowledge, but also to encourage questioning among young people and to increase their desire for understanding and their will to build a future which would enable us to manage the challenge of global change.
Partnership projects could feature different activities, such as real-time experiments in the laboratory, field or at school, site visits, topical lectures, debates, access to research results, follow-up communication by e-mail, etc. CARBOSCHOOLS+ projects were coordinated by teachers and the partner scientist was usually involved in two or three activities within the duration of the whole project. A final output, such as an article, an exhibition, a conference, a webpage, a set of measurements and their interpretation, concludes the students' work by sharing the findings with a wider audience, e.g. parents, friends, local community or city, giving additional meaning, visibility and recognition to the schools' efforts as well as greater social impact for the scientists' contributions.
Climate change research is highly international, systemic and interdisciplinary, exciting and exotic, full of unknowns and will more and more influence decision making at every political and economical level. School science is often perceived as boring, purely theoretical, disconnected from social issues and real life and not related to real science, i.e. a world run by stereotypical 'old men with glasses surrounded by explosions'. Grounded on this contrast CARBOSCHOOLS+ aimed to connect school education with authentic scientific learning based upon:
1. questioning and experimenting rather than on transmitting pure knowledge
2. addressing a complex issue that affected all of society
3. developing close personal contact with researchers to discover how they worked to challenge the stereotype and see scientists as real people.
An important parallel objective of CARBOSCHOOLS+ was to investigate the actual impact of innovative activities of that kind on the pupils. This led to a dedicated work package (WP) measuring the project's educational impact through classical internal evaluation indicators, namely activity reports and questionnaires, but also through an in-depth study conducted by a researcher in science communication. The goal of this evaluation study was to understand how knowledge and perception of science and global change was evolving (in part as a consequence of our work) and to better understand the level of effectiveness of this novel form of project based interactive learning in a real world research context, bringing a significant contribution to the broader educational debate and evolution of science teaching in Europe.
Needs of scientists involved in school projects
The first three years of piloting CARBOSCHOOLS+ within CarboEurope and CarboOcean demonstrated that European integrated research projects could be a powerful channel to promote the involvement of scientists in school projects. However, it also highlighted two very clear needs for those scientists interested in such projects. These scientists needed:
1. reinforced coordination, visibility, networking and sharing of resources and good practice at the European level and
2. organisational and educational support at the local level to be able to make the best use of limited availability of time for educational outreach within highly pressured research agendas.
Whatever the level of enthusiasm and goodwill might be, leaving these needs unattended would basically leave the status-quo where it was, i.e. a few scientists individually motivated (and in any case working with schools by themselves), a few definitely against (who wouldn't get involved whatever support was offered), while many would think it would be good to do something and just wouldn't take the initiative due to restrictions imposed by lack of confidence, time, contacts, methodology, resources etc.
Operational objectives: Coordinating a European network of regional projects
CARBOSCHOOLS+ in FP7 was primarily designed to address these two levels of need. After the time of pilot projects run by motivated individuals, the main operational goal was to consolidate and coordinate a European network of structured regional CARBOSCHOOLS+ projects run by research institutes towards schools of their region. The objectives of regional projects were:
1. to stimulate and support scientists and teachers willing to get involved in partnership projects
2. to demonstrate the value and management model of educational initiatives integrated with research institutions
3. to invest in lasting relationships and impact on partner schools and as far as possible document how partner schools sent more and better prepared students to university science studies
4. to activate and involve key local players such as school authorities, teacher associations, parents associations, teacher training institutes, science museums etc.
5. to create a climate for cooperation, co-production and exchange of tools, know-how, materials, methodologies at a European level and reach a critical mass of players able to stimulate and take inspiration from each other
6. beyond school projects themselves, to reach families and local communities and larger numbers of teachers through the dissemination of project materials and, ultimately, contribute to the advancement of science teaching and a science closer to society within the EU.
Nine regional CARBOSCHOOLS+ projects in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK) were thus developed as part of the project, all based on existing experience in school partnerships, recent for some and well rooted for others, and under a clear principle of diversity and cooperation. Rather than trying to streamline the projects to be more or less similar to each other, we decided to use a wide variety of approaches in methods, topics and target groups, such as young and older students, marine and terrestrial carbon science, science and language communication teachers etc., to find out which tools were best suitable to better link scientific research and school education. Close cooperation between this wide range of approaches to a same overall aim became an important parallel objective, to allow us to compare results, learn from each other to refine the strategies and publish exemplar materials of best practice.
One of the objectives of CARBOSCHOOLS+ was also to encourage pupils and teachers to experience themselves the benefits and constraints, e.g. language, of international cooperation that scientists practiced daily. This led to:
1. a common 'school carbon dioxide (CO2) web' activity undertaken by most regional projects, where schools performed CO2 measurements on their own and compared their data with each other. This activity resulted from a first year of piloting with three schools in the Netherlands, benefiting from a fully field-tested set of activities with CO2 sensors and weather stations.
2.encouraging to schools to set up Comenius partnerships projects, as a way to finance teachers' meetings and students' linguistic exchanges.
Last but not least, in terms of final outputs CARBOSCHOOLS+ aimed at:
1. producing and widely disseminating new materials, resources and methodologies for promoting hands-on experimental learning about climate change science
2. presenting the lessons learned at a final conference, transferring this model of regional projects to more research institutes and science education organisations, by demonstrating working examples and good practices.
'http://www.carboeurope.org' received EUR 16.3 million by FP6 funding from 2004 to 2008 and had 65 partners from 17 countries. 'http://www.carboocean.org' received EUR 14.5 million by FP6 funding from 2005 to 2009 and had 40 partners from 14 countries. This project reached its peak with a 'Call for CARBOSCHOOLS+' sent in June 2005 with a formal letter by the coordinators of CarboEurope and CarboOcean to the 105 heads of institutes members of the two programmes. Other institutional support included plenary sessions during each annual meeting, a four-day launch workshop and a full training day during the CarboEurope annual meeting in November 2005.
Project Results:
CARBOSCHOOLS+ linked researchers from several leading carbon science laboratories in Europe with secondary schools. In these partnerships, young Europeans conducted experiments on the impact of greenhouse gases and learned about climate research and the reduction of emissions. Scientists and teachers cooperated over several months to give young people practical experience of research through true investigations and interactions with real scientists. The pupils also had the opportunity to inform the wider community about climate change by producing a final output of articles, exhibitions, conferences etc.
Piloted from 2004 to 2007 by CarboEurope and CarboOcean, two major research projects on the carbon cycle, in the frame of FP7 science in society CARBOSCHOOLS+ involved nine research institute in seven countries from January 2008 to December 2010 to explore how they could best motivate and support such partnerships at the regional level across a wide variety of contexts, topics and age groups.
In the beginning of 2008 nine regional coordinators (RCs) were appointed by the CARBOSCHOOLS+ partners and all attended a kick-off meeting and training workshop hosted in Norwich, UK, by the teacher scientist network (TSN) in March. The training workshop generated a 'Regional coordinator's handbook' including a brief but readily accessible guide '12 steps to a successful partnership' based on the groups collective experience but guided by discussions with a long established TSN partnership.
Regional projects were further developed and networked through team building in project meetings and European cooperation (e-mails, visits, phone etc.). The cooperation was open to associated partners in Cluj Napoca, Romania and from TSP, a Comenius-funded teacher training sister project in Heidelberg, Germany and Uppsala, Sweden. An interim project meeting in Pistoia, Italy, from 25 to 30 April 2009 gathered up to 100 participants in the first day in common with the TSP final conference. Locally, day after day, regional coordinators visited schools, initiated activities and partnerships, organised training sessions, produced materials and local websites and arranged special days with public presentation of project results.
Over the two school years covered by the project, i.e. 2008-2009 and 2009-2010, a total of circa 90 school projects involving 221 scientists, 232 teachers and 2 475 pupils demonstrated the vitality of the project with a great variety of approaches and projects of all topics, ages, duration etc. By active involvement in designing experiments and project ideas, planning Comenius activities, contributing to the final publication, teachers involved in CARBOSCHOOLS+ formed a very dynamic group of active partners, both locally and at the European level.
The 'schoolCO2web', a common CO2 measurement activity was developed. During the first half of the project, a lot of resources and energy were used to set up the technical infrastructure. Local support laboratories purchased CO2 sensors and weather stations and installed them in schools, while the central laboratory:
1. provided them will all information needed for installing and calibrating sensors and sending data, including through a manual for support laboratories and schools with instructions how to set up their stations, available in the SchoolCO2web page of the CARBOSCHOOLS+ website
2. supported them with technical difficulties occurring during setup and installation
3. developed the software needed to set up the visual interface showing data on the web.
A total of 17 stations were made operational out of 20 planned initially. All operational stations produced and sent data to the database which was made available at 'http://www.carboschools.org/schoolsweb.php' graphically as well as in tabular form by means of a simple web tool. Schools could use this tool to see long term trends, seasonal variations, compare and interpret local situations from a place to another etc.
Several regional coordinators helped teachers and students to work with the measurements, e.g. analysing CO2 levels and weather parameters within a long period and in one day of different seasons. During the meeting in Pistoia in April 2009, teachers involved in the activity were offered a dedicated group session and a workshop about working with the measurements.
Unexpectedly, the chosen Vaisala CO2 sensor revealed calibration problems which required developing new software with the functionality to perform a calibration in a simple way, in order for schools to do this by themselves. Calibration problems, which form a large part of the typical difficulties met in atmospheric science, prevented from comparing and combining data between different stations, but not from using the censors and working with the data locally.
A new document describing the educational benefits of the project was released in September 2010. It contained a list of topics related to CO2 measurements, which could be used in the classroom or individual pupil projects. These topics were divided into technical and scientific studies. For each topic, background information, learning aims, activities, required time and options for interactions with other CARBOSCHOOLS+ partners were listed. The document contained appendices to facilitate the use of the SchoolCO2web, such as download and usage of data, possibilities for reporting and examples of interesting data series which could be used directly in the classroom.
An in-depth educational research evaluated the regional projects and measured attitude changes of participating students. Three instruments were developed and implemented:
Self evaluation tools (SETs)
2. attitude questionnaire
3. interviews.
SETs were used to evaluate school projects, implemented either by regional coordinators or by teachers. SET was a short questionnaire asking for students' personal information and opinions, giving information on the perception by students of projects. Furthermore, SET provided information on how students perceived science and school science and whether they would like a career in science. SET made it possible to correlate students' answers to their characteristics, like sex, school level, grades for science subjects etc. SET was filled in by a total number of 1 500 students from eight regions.
Questionnaires on students' personal attitudes were developed to measure students' attitude changes towards school science, social implications of science, scientists, a career in science, the urgency of climate change and environmental awareness. A knowledge test on climate change was also part of this questionnaire, to see whether knowledge influenced attitudes. The attitude instrument was administered twice to selected groups as pre-test and post-test, covering a total of 670 students in five regions. This questionnaire was only implemented in projects that met some criteria on student age and duration of the project.
The results showed in the same time a huge success of the projects in terms of participants' appreciation and the limits of peripheral activities of this kind compared to mainstream school culture in terms of impact on students. The main findings were introduced as follows in the project's final publication:
Firstly, it appeared that the students were very positive about the CARBOSCHOOLS+ projects. An even more important result was that CARBOSCHOOLS+ achieved two of its most important aims, i.e. the students were more interested in science careers and they became more aware of the importance of climate change research for society. It was interesting that girls in particular benefited from the projects. Interview data supported the positive evaluation results and highlighted some of the specific benefits and constraints of the projects. The evaluations reflected personal opinions on the projects. To collect more objective information on the impact of projects we used attitude questionnaires. This way, we measured changes in the students' feelings towards several aspects of science and the environment during the period that they worked on the projects. Because it is well-known that students' attitudes towards science decline during high school, we were interested to find out if we could positively influence this trend. We found that we did not succeed in achieving this. Attitudes did not change significantly or even declined in some cases. This did not necessarily mean that our initial assumptions on the positive effects of CARBOSCHOOLS+ activities on attitudes were wrong. The contrast between the very positive opinions of participating students and this lack of effect on the usual decline in attitudes rather suggested that other experiences, mostly from science lessons in schools, had a more dominant influence on the students' attitudes compared to CARBOSCHOOLS+ projects, which most teachers described as heavily constrained and limited by timetables, curricula and other structural factors. Nevertheless, although the students' environmental awareness remained unchanged, we found that students improved their knowledge on climate change significantly. Finally, our results showed how collaboration between research institutes and schools opened up novel ways to teach science.
CARBOSCHOOLS+ produced educational materials both for project participants and the broader teaching community. Although a multitude of websites offered information on various aspects of climate change, very little existed in the concrete work with schools on the marine carbon cycle, the CO2 exchange as a part of agricultural methods or the CO2 uptake of forests. At the first meeting in Norwich the partners contributed the materials they had available locally, but these required adaptation for use in schools and testing in the classroom. On this ground regional projects developed several experiments and procedures suitable for schools and their application in actual teaching situations. The meeting in Pistoia (April 2009) provided a platform for presentations of these materials by and to the school teachers involved in the project. Feedback from teachers allowed identifying priority directions for the design of new materials.
The production of materials made considerable progress during the second half of the CARBOSCHOOLS+ project. As the project ended, 24 pdf instruction sheets in English produced and tested in CARBOSCHOOLS+ were available for download in the library section of the project's website consisting in:
1. fourteen in the section 'Indoor hands-on', concentrating on the role of the greenhouse effect, on the air-sea exchange of CO2 and its uptake by the ocean
2. seven in 'Outdoor hands-on', with an emphasis on concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and photosynthetic uptake by plants
3. three in 'Using scientific data', in which Excel worksheets allowed analysis of observed CO2 concentrations.
These materials described experiments suitable for different age ranges, topics and time frames at school, as well as activities that could be carried out as collaboration between schools and research institutions. All of the instruction sheets underwent a thorough review process during the Jena spring meeting 2010, where the teachers present at the workshop critically evaluated these materials for their applicability in school. All materials were sent to the Scientix platform, where they formed part of the database of resources accessible to any interested teachers and subject to be translated on demand.
Moreover, the project developed 'Global change: From research to the classroom', which was a crucial instrument in guiding teachers to the content offered in the library and was this CARBOSCHOOLS+ third booklet and final publication of the project, released on 29 November 2010. This 70 page illustrated book was a tremendous collective effort by all project partners, through a progressive writing process initiated in April 2009 at the project meeting in Pistoia where the book structure and chapter lead authors were agreed. The quality of its contents reflected the diversity of author profiles, including teachers, scientists, science educators and educational researchers. The book primarily hoped to inspire teachers to integrate authentic climate change science into their teaching, based on the essential components learned through the CARBOSCHOOLS+ experience:
1. chapter one described the critical role of education when responding to the climate crisis and the paramount need to move Education for sustainable development from the margin to the centre of school systems and curricula worldwide
2. chapter two gave practical ideas and examples of how to design and run a school project on the topic, i.e. how to organise student groups, how to assemble a coherent series of activities under a common issue towards an end-product etc.
3. chapter three provided practical advice and case studies on the fundamental specificity of CARBOSCHOOLS+, i.e. how to partner schools with scientists and research institutions, and what this brought
4. chapter four offered examples of experiments illustrating the carbon cycle in the atmosphere, soils and oceans as an introduction to the CARBOSCHOOLS+ library
5. chapter five illustrated what we learnt through in-depth evaluation on the success of these activities with pupils and their actual educational impact.
This structure reflected one of the most stringent challenges of the climate change science educator, namely how to combine learning scientific facts in an exciting and efficient way through inquiry-based learning, with fully addressing the meaning of this science to society, i.e. solving the climate problem and genuinely achieving sustainability. The first was essentially a matter of acquiring knowledge, where experiments and teacher and scientist partnerships would contribute in a novel way; the latter was rather a matter of working on values, representations and action competencies, where working within the broader frame of long-term interdisciplinary projects would make a huge difference.
A publication announcement circulated in November led to an impressive total of 2 300 requests for hardcopies from all regions of the world, which for a publication of this nature was quite unexpected and illustrated the great need faced by teachers worldwide for resources on the topic. A French version was planned to be edited in January 2011 and hardcopies would be distributed to French teachers.
In addition, the central website of the project was launched on 30 September 2008 at 'http://www.carboschoold.org' providing a multi-language overview over the whole project and the regional projects, a teacher-friendly library with tested and commented resources, such as experiments, project ideas etc., data from SchoolCO2web and links to the individual websites of the regional projects. The structure of the website, particularly the library, was critically reviewed at a mid-term project meeting in Italy in April 2009 and a number of issues were identified that should help to make it more user friendly particularly for teachers. As a result, the structure of the online library was redesigned in the first half of 2010 to adapt it to the teachers' way of looking for information relevant to their teaching. Since May 2010 a new slideshow, also available on YouTube, welcomed the visitor on the main page, illustrating the various ways in which CARBOSCHOOLS+ worked and the topics it addressed.
To continue to involve and stimulate the broader scientific community, CARBOSCHOOLS+ sessions were organised at all CarboEurope, CarboOcean and EPOCA project meetings, mixing oral and poster presentations by scientists, teachers, pupils and CARBOSCHOOLS+ members. In November 2008 CarboOcean PhDs were trained in communication of their research results to schools in a dedicated session. In September 2010 more than 200 scientists followed a plenary session on education and outreach at the joint EPOCA, UKOARP and BIOACID project meeting on ocean acidification.
The project's final meeting took the form of a spring school involving pupils and teachers from all regional projects, coupled with a public 'global change science festival' and an open conference on 'Teacher-scientist partnerships for climate change education: Results and perspectives'. These three combined events were hosted by MPI-BGC in Jena, Germany from 10 to 16 April 2010.
The conference showed achievements from the nine regional projects in partnership between scientists and secondary school teachers, discussed the educational impact of these projects and offered new inspiration, tools and resources for climate change education to the broader educational community in Europe and beyond and to research institutes willing to develop their education and outreach activities. This included sharing experience with other climate change science education initiatives, such as Globe and La main à la pâte which responded positively to our invitation to Jena.
The spring school gathered 45 students and 15 teachers from all partners and an associated project in Cluj, Romania. Three thematic workshops on ocean, ecosystems and atmosphere were offered with science presentations by pupils, scientists and CARBOSCHOOLS+ regional coordinators. Group work focussed on producing joint outputs illustrating an aspect of the carbon issue to be presented at the science festival, e.g. a video, game, poster, newspaper, webpage, new experiment etc.
The global change science festival, in common between the spring school and the conference and open to schools from Jena, families and the general public, consisted in an open day in the main hall of the MPI building in Jena where CARBOSCHOOLS+ participants, namely students, teachers, scientists and regional coordinators presented experiments, games, posters, videos etc. developed within the project and invited everyone to try and take part. It culminated in a 'flash mob' event in the streets of Jena. These combined events were a huge success and key momentum in the project life.
The main dissemination activity at the regional project level took the form of 'final' regional events where participants presented their results to a wider community of educators, scientists, research and educational institutions interested in climate change science education.
External communication with all stakeholders interested in climate change science education led to an impressive list of press releases, public talks, conferences, publications, movies etc. at all geographical scales, including a key contribution to the United Nations Educational and Science Committee (UNESCO) world conference on education for sustainable development in Bonn in March 2009.
Potential Impact:
Impact on participating students, teachers and scientists
CARBOSCHOOLS+ included an integrated component of educational research measuring the project's impact on participating students. As mentioned above, this study revealed a contrasting picture between the two instruments used. Self-evaluation questionnaires (filled by pupils just once at the end of project) expressed a very high level of satisfaction while attitude questionnaires (where pre-project and post-project questionnaires attempt to detect attitude changes through the duration of the project) showed that our students followed the natural decline in attitudes towards science generally observed as teenagers get older, regardless of their participation in CARBOSCHOOLS+. The meaning of these contrasting results meaning was discussed in the chapter five of the third CARBOSCHOOLS+ booklet, and more extensively in the full evaluation report, in deliverable 4.3.
It should additionally be stressed from past experience that exceptional activities during school time like CARBOSCHOOLS+ might actually impact pupils deeply, but in a way that might take years to become visible; by measuring attitude change between just before and just after a project, we simply failed to see any longer term impact.
The second important level of impact of CARBOSCHOOLS+ was the impact on the participating teachers and scientists. Chapter three in our final publication, titled cooperation between schools and research, discussed this impact thoroughly.
Dissemination
The CARBOSCHOOLS+ website would remain open during the coming years as the central access source for the many materials developed during the course of the project. We expected to see these materials used beyond the project end at various levels:
1. at the school level: experience from past teacher-scientist partnerships showed that once such collaborations were set, they generally remained active for many years. The investment into human networking between scientists and teachers would continue to bring its fruits during several years beyond the end of the project, benefiting many more pupils than those involved during the funded phase.
2. at the country level: through dissemination events, networking, regular communication with school authorities and interested teachers' networks, most CARBOSCHOOLS+ partners reached a significant level of visibility ensuring that the on-line library became well known
3. at the international level, three main dissemination channels could be mentioned, namely the Scientix platform where all CARBOSCHOOLS+ materials were also made available and where we hoped to see some of them progressively translated, the UNESCO networks for climate change education, and generally the growing demand for climate change science education materials worldwide, which we expected to generate many downloads.
3. the carbon-related research projects and networks, which would continue to spread the development of CARBOSCHOOLS+ activities and materials in the coming years. The GHG-Europe project meeting in March 2011 and the EPOCA project meeting in May 2011 already set a slot in their agenda to highlight results and resources which participating scientists could bring back to their home institutions in support to their education and outreach activities.
In support to that, the impressive number of booklet orders, a total exceeding 2 300 copies, raised by the announcement of our final publication 'Global change: From research to the classroom' gave us high hopes that this book would be widely disseminated in interested educational networks and further translated in the coming years.
List of websites:
Project public website: 'http://www.carboschools.org'.
This website provided the list of all beneficiaries with contact names, as well as a slideshow, several pictures and access to all materials produced in the project. The next pages describe and comment the statistics of the project's website use.
CARBOSCHOOLS+ website: some statistics about visitors
Results were coming from Google analytics. All pages were analysed but we did not have statistics about files downloaded. As all resources of the library existed as pdf files, we strongly thought that these results underevaluated the number of visits of the CARBOSCHOOLS+ website.
Statistics were provided since 7 September 2009, even if the website existed since September 2008.
Results for visits since September 2009
CARBOSCHOOLS+ website received between 150 and 200 visits per week and between 450 and 640 visits per month. Since 14 November 2010, number of visits significantly increased. From 14 to 20 November it received 314 visits and November 2010 was the most visited month with 869 visits. Schools holydays also had an influence. The number of visits strongly decreased at the end of civil year and during summer.
Geographical origin
In terms of the origin of visitors, the greener were the countries, more visitors they had. Almost all countries had visitors and a large part of visitors were coming from Europe. France and Germany were far away from other countries.
It is also interesting to present results since September 2010 because the library was updated in spring 2010 and September 2010 was the first beginning of scholar year since this updating.
Results for a shorter recent period could also show trends of the website for visitors' origin and interest of pages since new pages were proposed (for example library pages were more or less six months old). During this period visitors from the United States of America (USA) became predominant. The library became a more important choice for CARBOSCHOOLS+ visitors.
CARBOSCHOOLS+ was a contribution to equipping European Union (EU) education systems with new tools, methods and resources for promoting inquiry based and society based science education in a perspective of sustainable development, through the challenge of climate change.
Initiated by research projects on the carbon cycle, CARBOSCHOOLS+ linked researchers from several leading carbon science laboratories with secondary schools. In these partnerships, young Europeans conducted experiments on the impact of greenhouse gases and learned about climate research and the reduction of emissions. Scientists and teachers cooperated over several months to give young people practical experience of research through true investigations, interactions with real scientists and public presentations.
From January 2008 to December 2010, nine research institutes in seven countries explored how they could best motivate, initiate and support such partnerships at the regional level across a wide variety of contexts, topics and age-groups. European cooperation made it possible to compare results, learn from each other and develop replicable good practice. In total, more than 90 schools were involved in this 'educational laboratory', exploring a whole range of experiments and project activities, evaluating them and publishing them on the project's online library of resources.
An in-depth evaluation study gave a very interesting and challenging picture of the project's impact on participating students. Students were very positive about the CARBOSCHOOLS+ project, which made them more interested in science careers (in particular girls) and more aware of the importance of climate change research for society. In the same time, in the surveyed groups CARBOSCHOOLS+ activities did not counteract the natural decline observed with students attitudes towards science and school science at teenage. This contrasting picture between participants' satisfaction and prevailing declining attitudes suggested that activities like CARBOSCHOOLS+, which teachers reported as heavily constrained and limited by timetables, curricula and other structural factors, would need more emphasis in order to impact attitudes.
A final publication 'Global change: From research to the classroom' coupled with the 'http://www.carboschools.org' website were the legacy of this educational experiment to the broader educational community in Europe and beyond. The book and an online library of resources (experiments, activities and project ideas) gave interested teachers concrete ideas and advice to make science learning more engaging, challenging and attractive and to encourage pupils to experience their global impact on the earth system and how they could help restore the balance.
Project context and objectives:
Motivation and origin
Climate change, the 'greatest uncontrolled scientific experiment of human history' and one of the biggest scientific challenges of the 21st century, is on the frontline daily. People directly feel and widely recognise it. It has become one of the most widespread societal issues where progressing our understanding through scientific research is critical to our children's future. CARBOSCHOOLS+ wanted to inspire the generation that would be most affected by our choices and actions.
CARBOSCHOOLS+ was an initiative of European climate change scientists to fulfil their moral and contractual obligation to convey their research results to the public, in particular young people. It was initiated in 2004 as a pilot educational network by CarboEurope and CarboOcean, two large Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) integrated research projects investigating the carbon cycle on land and ocean respectively. After three years of progress leading to a well-defined concept, a first set of educational resources and an active network of enthusiastic scientists and teachers, CARBOSCHOOLS+ became ready in 2007 for a new phase of structured development which became the purpose of this Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project funded by science in society.
In a rather original way compared to a majority of international climate change education projects mostly based on delivering facts and data through the internet, CARBOSCHOOLS+ was first and foremost based on human contact and on placing scientific issues in their wider social and citizenship context. Young people were overwhelmed with information about climate change and many were alarmed by the shock tactics of media, but they were not overwhelmed with offers of meaningful activities in their school education or with personal connections with real scientists working on a topic which remained fascinating and tremendously concerning and graphically illustrated first-hand the uncertainty of science.
Concept and educational objectives
The basic idea of CARBOSCHOOLS+ was to promote direct partnerships between secondary school teachers and global change scientists for young people to learn about climate change, gain a positive experience of scientific research and act locally to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The two main goals were to re-activate students' interest for science and scientific studies and to equip them with basic understanding of this major scientific challenge and its interaction with the society.
The strength of partnership projects was to involve pupils in a process over several weeks or months, or even years, built on a direct relationship between scientists and teachers to enable young people to gain practical experience of research. The stakes here were no longer only to inform or transfer knowledge, but also to encourage questioning among young people and to increase their desire for understanding and their will to build a future which would enable us to manage the challenge of global change.
Partnership projects could feature different activities, such as real-time experiments in the laboratory, field or at school, site visits, topical lectures, debates, access to research results, follow-up communication by e-mail, etc. CARBOSCHOOLS+ projects were coordinated by teachers and the partner scientist was usually involved in two or three activities within the duration of the whole project. A final output, such as an article, an exhibition, a conference, a webpage, a set of measurements and their interpretation, concludes the students' work by sharing the findings with a wider audience, e.g. parents, friends, local community or city, giving additional meaning, visibility and recognition to the schools' efforts as well as greater social impact for the scientists' contributions.
Climate change research is highly international, systemic and interdisciplinary, exciting and exotic, full of unknowns and will more and more influence decision making at every political and economical level. School science is often perceived as boring, purely theoretical, disconnected from social issues and real life and not related to real science, i.e. a world run by stereotypical 'old men with glasses surrounded by explosions'. Grounded on this contrast CARBOSCHOOLS+ aimed to connect school education with authentic scientific learning based upon:
1. questioning and experimenting rather than on transmitting pure knowledge
2. addressing a complex issue that affected all of society
3. developing close personal contact with researchers to discover how they worked to challenge the stereotype and see scientists as real people.
An important parallel objective of CARBOSCHOOLS+ was to investigate the actual impact of innovative activities of that kind on the pupils. This led to a dedicated work package (WP) measuring the project's educational impact through classical internal evaluation indicators, namely activity reports and questionnaires, but also through an in-depth study conducted by a researcher in science communication. The goal of this evaluation study was to understand how knowledge and perception of science and global change was evolving (in part as a consequence of our work) and to better understand the level of effectiveness of this novel form of project based interactive learning in a real world research context, bringing a significant contribution to the broader educational debate and evolution of science teaching in Europe.
Needs of scientists involved in school projects
The first three years of piloting CARBOSCHOOLS+ within CarboEurope and CarboOcean demonstrated that European integrated research projects could be a powerful channel to promote the involvement of scientists in school projects. However, it also highlighted two very clear needs for those scientists interested in such projects. These scientists needed:
1. reinforced coordination, visibility, networking and sharing of resources and good practice at the European level and
2. organisational and educational support at the local level to be able to make the best use of limited availability of time for educational outreach within highly pressured research agendas.
Whatever the level of enthusiasm and goodwill might be, leaving these needs unattended would basically leave the status-quo where it was, i.e. a few scientists individually motivated (and in any case working with schools by themselves), a few definitely against (who wouldn't get involved whatever support was offered), while many would think it would be good to do something and just wouldn't take the initiative due to restrictions imposed by lack of confidence, time, contacts, methodology, resources etc.
Operational objectives: Coordinating a European network of regional projects
CARBOSCHOOLS+ in FP7 was primarily designed to address these two levels of need. After the time of pilot projects run by motivated individuals, the main operational goal was to consolidate and coordinate a European network of structured regional CARBOSCHOOLS+ projects run by research institutes towards schools of their region. The objectives of regional projects were:
1. to stimulate and support scientists and teachers willing to get involved in partnership projects
2. to demonstrate the value and management model of educational initiatives integrated with research institutions
3. to invest in lasting relationships and impact on partner schools and as far as possible document how partner schools sent more and better prepared students to university science studies
4. to activate and involve key local players such as school authorities, teacher associations, parents associations, teacher training institutes, science museums etc.
5. to create a climate for cooperation, co-production and exchange of tools, know-how, materials, methodologies at a European level and reach a critical mass of players able to stimulate and take inspiration from each other
6. beyond school projects themselves, to reach families and local communities and larger numbers of teachers through the dissemination of project materials and, ultimately, contribute to the advancement of science teaching and a science closer to society within the EU.
Nine regional CARBOSCHOOLS+ projects in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK) were thus developed as part of the project, all based on existing experience in school partnerships, recent for some and well rooted for others, and under a clear principle of diversity and cooperation. Rather than trying to streamline the projects to be more or less similar to each other, we decided to use a wide variety of approaches in methods, topics and target groups, such as young and older students, marine and terrestrial carbon science, science and language communication teachers etc., to find out which tools were best suitable to better link scientific research and school education. Close cooperation between this wide range of approaches to a same overall aim became an important parallel objective, to allow us to compare results, learn from each other to refine the strategies and publish exemplar materials of best practice.
One of the objectives of CARBOSCHOOLS+ was also to encourage pupils and teachers to experience themselves the benefits and constraints, e.g. language, of international cooperation that scientists practiced daily. This led to:
1. a common 'school carbon dioxide (CO2) web' activity undertaken by most regional projects, where schools performed CO2 measurements on their own and compared their data with each other. This activity resulted from a first year of piloting with three schools in the Netherlands, benefiting from a fully field-tested set of activities with CO2 sensors and weather stations.
2.encouraging to schools to set up Comenius partnerships projects, as a way to finance teachers' meetings and students' linguistic exchanges.
Last but not least, in terms of final outputs CARBOSCHOOLS+ aimed at:
1. producing and widely disseminating new materials, resources and methodologies for promoting hands-on experimental learning about climate change science
2. presenting the lessons learned at a final conference, transferring this model of regional projects to more research institutes and science education organisations, by demonstrating working examples and good practices.
'http://www.carboeurope.org' received EUR 16.3 million by FP6 funding from 2004 to 2008 and had 65 partners from 17 countries. 'http://www.carboocean.org' received EUR 14.5 million by FP6 funding from 2005 to 2009 and had 40 partners from 14 countries. This project reached its peak with a 'Call for CARBOSCHOOLS+' sent in June 2005 with a formal letter by the coordinators of CarboEurope and CarboOcean to the 105 heads of institutes members of the two programmes. Other institutional support included plenary sessions during each annual meeting, a four-day launch workshop and a full training day during the CarboEurope annual meeting in November 2005.
Project Results:
CARBOSCHOOLS+ linked researchers from several leading carbon science laboratories in Europe with secondary schools. In these partnerships, young Europeans conducted experiments on the impact of greenhouse gases and learned about climate research and the reduction of emissions. Scientists and teachers cooperated over several months to give young people practical experience of research through true investigations and interactions with real scientists. The pupils also had the opportunity to inform the wider community about climate change by producing a final output of articles, exhibitions, conferences etc.
Piloted from 2004 to 2007 by CarboEurope and CarboOcean, two major research projects on the carbon cycle, in the frame of FP7 science in society CARBOSCHOOLS+ involved nine research institute in seven countries from January 2008 to December 2010 to explore how they could best motivate and support such partnerships at the regional level across a wide variety of contexts, topics and age groups.
In the beginning of 2008 nine regional coordinators (RCs) were appointed by the CARBOSCHOOLS+ partners and all attended a kick-off meeting and training workshop hosted in Norwich, UK, by the teacher scientist network (TSN) in March. The training workshop generated a 'Regional coordinator's handbook' including a brief but readily accessible guide '12 steps to a successful partnership' based on the groups collective experience but guided by discussions with a long established TSN partnership.
Regional projects were further developed and networked through team building in project meetings and European cooperation (e-mails, visits, phone etc.). The cooperation was open to associated partners in Cluj Napoca, Romania and from TSP, a Comenius-funded teacher training sister project in Heidelberg, Germany and Uppsala, Sweden. An interim project meeting in Pistoia, Italy, from 25 to 30 April 2009 gathered up to 100 participants in the first day in common with the TSP final conference. Locally, day after day, regional coordinators visited schools, initiated activities and partnerships, organised training sessions, produced materials and local websites and arranged special days with public presentation of project results.
Over the two school years covered by the project, i.e. 2008-2009 and 2009-2010, a total of circa 90 school projects involving 221 scientists, 232 teachers and 2 475 pupils demonstrated the vitality of the project with a great variety of approaches and projects of all topics, ages, duration etc. By active involvement in designing experiments and project ideas, planning Comenius activities, contributing to the final publication, teachers involved in CARBOSCHOOLS+ formed a very dynamic group of active partners, both locally and at the European level.
The 'schoolCO2web', a common CO2 measurement activity was developed. During the first half of the project, a lot of resources and energy were used to set up the technical infrastructure. Local support laboratories purchased CO2 sensors and weather stations and installed them in schools, while the central laboratory:
1. provided them will all information needed for installing and calibrating sensors and sending data, including through a manual for support laboratories and schools with instructions how to set up their stations, available in the SchoolCO2web page of the CARBOSCHOOLS+ website
2. supported them with technical difficulties occurring during setup and installation
3. developed the software needed to set up the visual interface showing data on the web.
A total of 17 stations were made operational out of 20 planned initially. All operational stations produced and sent data to the database which was made available at 'http://www.carboschools.org/schoolsweb.php' graphically as well as in tabular form by means of a simple web tool. Schools could use this tool to see long term trends, seasonal variations, compare and interpret local situations from a place to another etc.
Several regional coordinators helped teachers and students to work with the measurements, e.g. analysing CO2 levels and weather parameters within a long period and in one day of different seasons. During the meeting in Pistoia in April 2009, teachers involved in the activity were offered a dedicated group session and a workshop about working with the measurements.
Unexpectedly, the chosen Vaisala CO2 sensor revealed calibration problems which required developing new software with the functionality to perform a calibration in a simple way, in order for schools to do this by themselves. Calibration problems, which form a large part of the typical difficulties met in atmospheric science, prevented from comparing and combining data between different stations, but not from using the censors and working with the data locally.
A new document describing the educational benefits of the project was released in September 2010. It contained a list of topics related to CO2 measurements, which could be used in the classroom or individual pupil projects. These topics were divided into technical and scientific studies. For each topic, background information, learning aims, activities, required time and options for interactions with other CARBOSCHOOLS+ partners were listed. The document contained appendices to facilitate the use of the SchoolCO2web, such as download and usage of data, possibilities for reporting and examples of interesting data series which could be used directly in the classroom.
An in-depth educational research evaluated the regional projects and measured attitude changes of participating students. Three instruments were developed and implemented:
Self evaluation tools (SETs)
2. attitude questionnaire
3. interviews.
SETs were used to evaluate school projects, implemented either by regional coordinators or by teachers. SET was a short questionnaire asking for students' personal information and opinions, giving information on the perception by students of projects. Furthermore, SET provided information on how students perceived science and school science and whether they would like a career in science. SET made it possible to correlate students' answers to their characteristics, like sex, school level, grades for science subjects etc. SET was filled in by a total number of 1 500 students from eight regions.
Questionnaires on students' personal attitudes were developed to measure students' attitude changes towards school science, social implications of science, scientists, a career in science, the urgency of climate change and environmental awareness. A knowledge test on climate change was also part of this questionnaire, to see whether knowledge influenced attitudes. The attitude instrument was administered twice to selected groups as pre-test and post-test, covering a total of 670 students in five regions. This questionnaire was only implemented in projects that met some criteria on student age and duration of the project.
The results showed in the same time a huge success of the projects in terms of participants' appreciation and the limits of peripheral activities of this kind compared to mainstream school culture in terms of impact on students. The main findings were introduced as follows in the project's final publication:
Firstly, it appeared that the students were very positive about the CARBOSCHOOLS+ projects. An even more important result was that CARBOSCHOOLS+ achieved two of its most important aims, i.e. the students were more interested in science careers and they became more aware of the importance of climate change research for society. It was interesting that girls in particular benefited from the projects. Interview data supported the positive evaluation results and highlighted some of the specific benefits and constraints of the projects. The evaluations reflected personal opinions on the projects. To collect more objective information on the impact of projects we used attitude questionnaires. This way, we measured changes in the students' feelings towards several aspects of science and the environment during the period that they worked on the projects. Because it is well-known that students' attitudes towards science decline during high school, we were interested to find out if we could positively influence this trend. We found that we did not succeed in achieving this. Attitudes did not change significantly or even declined in some cases. This did not necessarily mean that our initial assumptions on the positive effects of CARBOSCHOOLS+ activities on attitudes were wrong. The contrast between the very positive opinions of participating students and this lack of effect on the usual decline in attitudes rather suggested that other experiences, mostly from science lessons in schools, had a more dominant influence on the students' attitudes compared to CARBOSCHOOLS+ projects, which most teachers described as heavily constrained and limited by timetables, curricula and other structural factors. Nevertheless, although the students' environmental awareness remained unchanged, we found that students improved their knowledge on climate change significantly. Finally, our results showed how collaboration between research institutes and schools opened up novel ways to teach science.
CARBOSCHOOLS+ produced educational materials both for project participants and the broader teaching community. Although a multitude of websites offered information on various aspects of climate change, very little existed in the concrete work with schools on the marine carbon cycle, the CO2 exchange as a part of agricultural methods or the CO2 uptake of forests. At the first meeting in Norwich the partners contributed the materials they had available locally, but these required adaptation for use in schools and testing in the classroom. On this ground regional projects developed several experiments and procedures suitable for schools and their application in actual teaching situations. The meeting in Pistoia (April 2009) provided a platform for presentations of these materials by and to the school teachers involved in the project. Feedback from teachers allowed identifying priority directions for the design of new materials.
The production of materials made considerable progress during the second half of the CARBOSCHOOLS+ project. As the project ended, 24 pdf instruction sheets in English produced and tested in CARBOSCHOOLS+ were available for download in the library section of the project's website consisting in:
1. fourteen in the section 'Indoor hands-on', concentrating on the role of the greenhouse effect, on the air-sea exchange of CO2 and its uptake by the ocean
2. seven in 'Outdoor hands-on', with an emphasis on concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and photosynthetic uptake by plants
3. three in 'Using scientific data', in which Excel worksheets allowed analysis of observed CO2 concentrations.
These materials described experiments suitable for different age ranges, topics and time frames at school, as well as activities that could be carried out as collaboration between schools and research institutions. All of the instruction sheets underwent a thorough review process during the Jena spring meeting 2010, where the teachers present at the workshop critically evaluated these materials for their applicability in school. All materials were sent to the Scientix platform, where they formed part of the database of resources accessible to any interested teachers and subject to be translated on demand.
Moreover, the project developed 'Global change: From research to the classroom', which was a crucial instrument in guiding teachers to the content offered in the library and was this CARBOSCHOOLS+ third booklet and final publication of the project, released on 29 November 2010. This 70 page illustrated book was a tremendous collective effort by all project partners, through a progressive writing process initiated in April 2009 at the project meeting in Pistoia where the book structure and chapter lead authors were agreed. The quality of its contents reflected the diversity of author profiles, including teachers, scientists, science educators and educational researchers. The book primarily hoped to inspire teachers to integrate authentic climate change science into their teaching, based on the essential components learned through the CARBOSCHOOLS+ experience:
1. chapter one described the critical role of education when responding to the climate crisis and the paramount need to move Education for sustainable development from the margin to the centre of school systems and curricula worldwide
2. chapter two gave practical ideas and examples of how to design and run a school project on the topic, i.e. how to organise student groups, how to assemble a coherent series of activities under a common issue towards an end-product etc.
3. chapter three provided practical advice and case studies on the fundamental specificity of CARBOSCHOOLS+, i.e. how to partner schools with scientists and research institutions, and what this brought
4. chapter four offered examples of experiments illustrating the carbon cycle in the atmosphere, soils and oceans as an introduction to the CARBOSCHOOLS+ library
5. chapter five illustrated what we learnt through in-depth evaluation on the success of these activities with pupils and their actual educational impact.
This structure reflected one of the most stringent challenges of the climate change science educator, namely how to combine learning scientific facts in an exciting and efficient way through inquiry-based learning, with fully addressing the meaning of this science to society, i.e. solving the climate problem and genuinely achieving sustainability. The first was essentially a matter of acquiring knowledge, where experiments and teacher and scientist partnerships would contribute in a novel way; the latter was rather a matter of working on values, representations and action competencies, where working within the broader frame of long-term interdisciplinary projects would make a huge difference.
A publication announcement circulated in November led to an impressive total of 2 300 requests for hardcopies from all regions of the world, which for a publication of this nature was quite unexpected and illustrated the great need faced by teachers worldwide for resources on the topic. A French version was planned to be edited in January 2011 and hardcopies would be distributed to French teachers.
In addition, the central website of the project was launched on 30 September 2008 at 'http://www.carboschoold.org' providing a multi-language overview over the whole project and the regional projects, a teacher-friendly library with tested and commented resources, such as experiments, project ideas etc., data from SchoolCO2web and links to the individual websites of the regional projects. The structure of the website, particularly the library, was critically reviewed at a mid-term project meeting in Italy in April 2009 and a number of issues were identified that should help to make it more user friendly particularly for teachers. As a result, the structure of the online library was redesigned in the first half of 2010 to adapt it to the teachers' way of looking for information relevant to their teaching. Since May 2010 a new slideshow, also available on YouTube, welcomed the visitor on the main page, illustrating the various ways in which CARBOSCHOOLS+ worked and the topics it addressed.
To continue to involve and stimulate the broader scientific community, CARBOSCHOOLS+ sessions were organised at all CarboEurope, CarboOcean and EPOCA project meetings, mixing oral and poster presentations by scientists, teachers, pupils and CARBOSCHOOLS+ members. In November 2008 CarboOcean PhDs were trained in communication of their research results to schools in a dedicated session. In September 2010 more than 200 scientists followed a plenary session on education and outreach at the joint EPOCA, UKOARP and BIOACID project meeting on ocean acidification.
The project's final meeting took the form of a spring school involving pupils and teachers from all regional projects, coupled with a public 'global change science festival' and an open conference on 'Teacher-scientist partnerships for climate change education: Results and perspectives'. These three combined events were hosted by MPI-BGC in Jena, Germany from 10 to 16 April 2010.
The conference showed achievements from the nine regional projects in partnership between scientists and secondary school teachers, discussed the educational impact of these projects and offered new inspiration, tools and resources for climate change education to the broader educational community in Europe and beyond and to research institutes willing to develop their education and outreach activities. This included sharing experience with other climate change science education initiatives, such as Globe and La main à la pâte which responded positively to our invitation to Jena.
The spring school gathered 45 students and 15 teachers from all partners and an associated project in Cluj, Romania. Three thematic workshops on ocean, ecosystems and atmosphere were offered with science presentations by pupils, scientists and CARBOSCHOOLS+ regional coordinators. Group work focussed on producing joint outputs illustrating an aspect of the carbon issue to be presented at the science festival, e.g. a video, game, poster, newspaper, webpage, new experiment etc.
The global change science festival, in common between the spring school and the conference and open to schools from Jena, families and the general public, consisted in an open day in the main hall of the MPI building in Jena where CARBOSCHOOLS+ participants, namely students, teachers, scientists and regional coordinators presented experiments, games, posters, videos etc. developed within the project and invited everyone to try and take part. It culminated in a 'flash mob' event in the streets of Jena. These combined events were a huge success and key momentum in the project life.
The main dissemination activity at the regional project level took the form of 'final' regional events where participants presented their results to a wider community of educators, scientists, research and educational institutions interested in climate change science education.
External communication with all stakeholders interested in climate change science education led to an impressive list of press releases, public talks, conferences, publications, movies etc. at all geographical scales, including a key contribution to the United Nations Educational and Science Committee (UNESCO) world conference on education for sustainable development in Bonn in March 2009.
Potential Impact:
Impact on participating students, teachers and scientists
CARBOSCHOOLS+ included an integrated component of educational research measuring the project's impact on participating students. As mentioned above, this study revealed a contrasting picture between the two instruments used. Self-evaluation questionnaires (filled by pupils just once at the end of project) expressed a very high level of satisfaction while attitude questionnaires (where pre-project and post-project questionnaires attempt to detect attitude changes through the duration of the project) showed that our students followed the natural decline in attitudes towards science generally observed as teenagers get older, regardless of their participation in CARBOSCHOOLS+. The meaning of these contrasting results meaning was discussed in the chapter five of the third CARBOSCHOOLS+ booklet, and more extensively in the full evaluation report, in deliverable 4.3.
It should additionally be stressed from past experience that exceptional activities during school time like CARBOSCHOOLS+ might actually impact pupils deeply, but in a way that might take years to become visible; by measuring attitude change between just before and just after a project, we simply failed to see any longer term impact.
The second important level of impact of CARBOSCHOOLS+ was the impact on the participating teachers and scientists. Chapter three in our final publication, titled cooperation between schools and research, discussed this impact thoroughly.
Dissemination
The CARBOSCHOOLS+ website would remain open during the coming years as the central access source for the many materials developed during the course of the project. We expected to see these materials used beyond the project end at various levels:
1. at the school level: experience from past teacher-scientist partnerships showed that once such collaborations were set, they generally remained active for many years. The investment into human networking between scientists and teachers would continue to bring its fruits during several years beyond the end of the project, benefiting many more pupils than those involved during the funded phase.
2. at the country level: through dissemination events, networking, regular communication with school authorities and interested teachers' networks, most CARBOSCHOOLS+ partners reached a significant level of visibility ensuring that the on-line library became well known
3. at the international level, three main dissemination channels could be mentioned, namely the Scientix platform where all CARBOSCHOOLS+ materials were also made available and where we hoped to see some of them progressively translated, the UNESCO networks for climate change education, and generally the growing demand for climate change science education materials worldwide, which we expected to generate many downloads.
3. the carbon-related research projects and networks, which would continue to spread the development of CARBOSCHOOLS+ activities and materials in the coming years. The GHG-Europe project meeting in March 2011 and the EPOCA project meeting in May 2011 already set a slot in their agenda to highlight results and resources which participating scientists could bring back to their home institutions in support to their education and outreach activities.
In support to that, the impressive number of booklet orders, a total exceeding 2 300 copies, raised by the announcement of our final publication 'Global change: From research to the classroom' gave us high hopes that this book would be widely disseminated in interested educational networks and further translated in the coming years.
List of websites:
Project public website: 'http://www.carboschools.org'.
This website provided the list of all beneficiaries with contact names, as well as a slideshow, several pictures and access to all materials produced in the project. The next pages describe and comment the statistics of the project's website use.
CARBOSCHOOLS+ website: some statistics about visitors
Results were coming from Google analytics. All pages were analysed but we did not have statistics about files downloaded. As all resources of the library existed as pdf files, we strongly thought that these results underevaluated the number of visits of the CARBOSCHOOLS+ website.
Statistics were provided since 7 September 2009, even if the website existed since September 2008.
Results for visits since September 2009
CARBOSCHOOLS+ website received between 150 and 200 visits per week and between 450 and 640 visits per month. Since 14 November 2010, number of visits significantly increased. From 14 to 20 November it received 314 visits and November 2010 was the most visited month with 869 visits. Schools holydays also had an influence. The number of visits strongly decreased at the end of civil year and during summer.
Geographical origin
In terms of the origin of visitors, the greener were the countries, more visitors they had. Almost all countries had visitors and a large part of visitors were coming from Europe. France and Germany were far away from other countries.
It is also interesting to present results since September 2010 because the library was updated in spring 2010 and September 2010 was the first beginning of scholar year since this updating.
Results for a shorter recent period could also show trends of the website for visitors' origin and interest of pages since new pages were proposed (for example library pages were more or less six months old). During this period visitors from the United States of America (USA) became predominant. The library became a more important choice for CARBOSCHOOLS+ visitors.
