This poster presents a set of 15 school-university partnerships promoted within a municipality educational program to foster lower and upper secondary students’ scientific literacy and understanding of scientific research. In these partnerships, researchers from faculties and research centers in different fields worked in close collaboration with students of specific schools in the development of research projects throughout a school session (approximately 8 months). Each secondary school of the city was paired with a team from a different faculty or research center, with the logistic and financial support of the municipality. These pairings allowed educational and research partnerships in different fields of knowledge and with very distinctive models of implementation and research methodologies.

The objectives of this poster are to present the participant students’ attitudes towards science and understanding of scientific research after developing the research projects in partnerships with university researchers and to evaluate the effects of the students’ schooling profiles, methodologies of research used and models of partnership implemented in the students’ findings. Cross analysis of the perspectives of the municipality (promoter) with the ones of different participants (students, school teachers and university researchers) are made with data collected from the documents supporting the program, from questionnaires and focus groups with the participant students, and from interviews with participant university researchers and school teachers that supervised the students in collaboration with the university researchers.

Calls for the need of a public engagement with scientific research are neither new nor outdated. Engagement with scientific research is undermined by a poor understanding of the nature of science and scientific research and consequent negative attitudes towards science that should be prevented early in school education. Schools and universities are in privileged positions to promote this understanding in both teachers and students and to spread out those effects to families and communities. Although efforts have been made in terms of curricula, schools’ textbooks, other teaching materials and more learner-centered and inquiry based instructional approaches (Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, Waters, & Le, 2008; Lederman, 2007; Treagust, 2007; Vázquez-Alonso & Manassero-Mas, 2012), recent studies still reveal a highly pronounced absence of understanding the nature of science and scientific research among European citizens (EC-Eurobarometer, 2010). Moreover, although young people seem to be rather positive towards science and technology, they are also more conscious and critical of its problematic sides (Sjøberg, & Schreiner, 2010), but frequently they do not have the necessary understandings of the nature of science (Hoolbrook & Rannikmae, 2009) as well as the thinking skills to deal with the increasing amount of produced information and its implications. Another approach has been to engage primary and secondary students in out-of- or after-school activities such as clubs, visits to museums and university’s labs and apprenticeship-based scientific research programs (e.g., Aydeniz, Baksa & Skinner, 2011) which frequently occur with the collaboration of university researchers. Though school-university partnerships have long been frequent in education, they mostly involve in-service teacher training, professional development, curriculum reform, consultancy and research (Baumfield, & Butterworth, 2007; Handscomb, Gu & Varley, 2014; Walshe & Backe, 2013). So, they focus on collaborative work between teachers and university researchers as a means to foster co-construction of knowledge and educational improvement to ultimately benefit the students. Hardly ever direct collaboration between university researchers and secondary students in research projects was reported. This poster presents examples of such a type of collaboration within school-university partnerships and aims at incite the discussion of its possibilities and benefits for both students and teachers active engagement with scientific research and inquiry-rich innovative learning environments.

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