This paper introduce the ScienceIES (former PIIISA) project and investigate the effects of participating in the project on secondary student’s scientific literacy and motivation for science.       

We presents a study of the innovative ideas in ‘Project for the Initiation to Research and Innovation at High School’ (ScienceIES) (Cáceres, 2014) that aim at improving learning science connecting educational and scientific environments following the directions of several international reports (ROCARD, 2007; NUFFIELD, 2008). The main focus was the spaces where students can manage to produce diverse and strong personal experiences to support the development of their own identities and skills outside the school. Therefore, the project focuses on both teaching and classroom activities and establishing partnerships/complicity between scientists, teachers and students (STSPs). A deep knowledge of NdC is gained by students here (Acevedo, 2007) allowing them to dive into the meaning of scientific research, and thereby improving their understanding of what science is and how it evolves in real contexts (Alché, 2015) under the guidance of professional scientists (Martínez-Abarca, 2016). It has a rich methodology that appear to be very effective in developing scientific literacy in students in third and fourth year of lower secondary education and first year of high secondary. It is important to remark that this is an unique an consolidated worldwide initiative (Cáceres, 2016), which promote this kind of outdoors learning for thousands of students and hundreds of scientists and teachers in a real scientific environment in the pass nine years.

As the project builds on students actively taking part in partnership with scientists giving them opportunities to develop practices in laboratories about what they learn in classrooms, the project builds on theories of learning, seen as a process of Peripheral Participation in Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1999) and thus also on the theory of Dewey (Dewey, 1916) on producing experiences – and deep learning - in social setting and in direct collaboration with the scientific world.

The interactive relationship between theory and practice and the interplay between scientist experience and students’ reflections are basic for planning instruction and relationships at ScienceIES. But here professionals are concerned not only with how, but also with what and why (Shulman, 1986), so being in charge not only for procedure but also of content and rationale. They shift from knowledge (as substance) to knowing (knowledge as a contextualized relation) for students (Carlgren, 2005). It intends to open new possibilities for the design of more open and participatory learning environment, which allow students to become active participants in building their own knowledge, and this should allow them  connecting to diverse communities and to future situations. This could widen up their view on the future society, where they can become educated citizens (Klafki, 2000). 

The innovative project claims to be distinctive because it allows students to experience a social learning environment outside the school and get involved in projects led by renowned scientists in a real context, over an extended period of time. Students have a first contact with research and find out first-hand what research is like and benefit from a rich “all-in-one package” methodology, thus allowing them to reflect their views and experiences along the way in their own words in essays named “My own ideas” Thereby they learn to communicate scientific concepts in English and organize their thoughts about different areas of scientific study available to them. This will increase enrolment in scientific education at both the secondary and tertiary level across Europe. It will also help to create a new generation of scientifically literate students, many of whom will play a role in the future of Europe. 

The program bring students to laboratories with scientists of the CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) and different Universities to develop reseach projects designed ad hoc, thus allowing the interrelationship among several social groups (students, teachers, scientists) to work “hand in hand” in the same subjects during seven months. The institutions have provided all their personal and technical potential, and have managed to start around 600 projects led by 500 scientists and addressed to 7000 students from 150 High Schools. Over time, results are diverse depending on the laboratories and the synergy among the team´s members, and those are presented in a final Scientific Congress every year, where works carried out by the different teams are displayed publicly to a forum composed by the scientific and educational communities. Students present orally their own communications using English as the lingua franca and posters sessions are displayed. Besides, all works are published in the yearly issued JOURNAL ScienceIES (Cáceres, 2017). In the research project we compiles an analysis of the main documents and results obtained during the nine years history of ScienceIES, and we raise the following research questions: 1. How can the project and its methods be understood, theoretically? 2. How do students, scientists and teachers describe their experiences, relations and learning in the project, - and how can they be understood? 3. How does the project support students in making sense of the scientific world, world views and working modes and of their relations to all that? 1. On the basis of document analyses of participatory (Cáceres) observation of practices and of diverse documents (programs, posters, articles, congresses) we focus on details of the proceedings, looking especially at relation-building and context and content descriptions and put them into perspective with theories of learning (Wenger, 1999), experience-relations (Dewey, 1916), and didactics (Klafki, 2000). 2. Sens-making processes are investigated through interviews with students, scientists and teachers and analyses of students’: ‘My Own Ideas’ articles and other articles are analysed with theory about sense-making (Weick, 2005) We also create a table of comparative terms from international report recommendations (ROCARD, 2007). 3. Attitudes are analyzed the same way as sense and for Science-related attitudes we use ‘Test of Science-Related Attitudes’ (TOSRA) is designed to measure seven distinct attitudes among Secondary School students (Fraser, 1981).

Students indicate and demonstrate a deeper understanding of scientific methods, procedure and aims. This can be seen both in the interviews and in the manifestations they have produced: posters, essays and articles. They use concepts and words more consciously and precisely and they show mostly great interest in these ways of learning and, maybe also in working at a later stage. Scientists are happy with encountering students and seeing their scares over the new worlds, and enthusiasm towards new insights. In fact, somehow in ScienceIES, researchers incorporates to their own research (from their own projects) new teams of young students, together with their teachers and families in order to increase the visibility of the Science made within this group, Department, or Scientific. Altogether ensures the development of scientific vocations among secondary students as one of the first aims of this proposal. Teachers appreciate greatly this new opportunity to connect classroom teaching to the ‘outer world’ and thereby gaining much motivation and engagement from students to learn, also in classrooms. At the same time, a new window for learning and improving their own teaching strategies and environments have been discovered.

•Alché, J. D., Espinosa, M., Martínez-Abarca, F., Palma, J. M. (2015). High School Students for Agricultural Science Research. V. Ed. EEZ, Granada. ISSN 2340-9746. •Acevedo-Díaz, J.A (2007). Consensos sobre la Naturaleza de la Ciencia: Fundamentos de investigación empírica. Rev. Eureka. Enseñ. Cien. 4 (1). •Cáceres, F.J.P., Vílchez-González, J.M y González-García, F. (2016). Los contenidos procedimentales y actitudinales en las diferentes leyes educativas en España. La necesidad de colaboraciones estudiantes-profesores-científicos para conseguir la alfabetización científica. En J.L. Bravo Galán. Ed, Actas de los 27 Encuentros de Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales, p. 667-675. Badajoz, España. •Lupión, T.C, Cáceres, F.J.P (2017). Apostando por las Vocaciones Científicas desde la Educación Secundaria: Oportunidades mediante investigaciones con el Programa ScienceIES (PIIISA). Innovación Educativa. Universidad de Málaga. •Cáceres, F.J.P., Naz-Lucena, A. M., Franco-Mariscal, A. J. (2017). JOURNAL ScienceIES. ISSN 2530-416X •Carlgren, I. (2005). The Content of Schooling – from knowledge and subject matter to knowledge formation and subject specific ways of knowing. Paper presented at ECER 2005 – European Conference on Educational Research, University College Dublin, 5-10 September 2005. • Fraser, B.J. (1981). TOSRA: Test of science-related attitudes handbook. Hawthorn, Victoria: Australian Council for Educational Research. •Klafki, W. (2000) Didaktik analysis as the core of preparation of instruction. In:Westbury, I, Hopmann, S, Riquarts, K (eds) Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp.197–206. •Martínez-Abarca, F. , Lupión-Cobos, T., Palma-Martínez, J.M (2016).La Importancia del Investigador Profesional en la Enseñanza Contextualizada de las Ciencias. En J.L. Bravo Galán. Ed, Actas de los 27 Encuentros de Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales. Badajoz, España. •NUFFIELD. 2008. Informe NUFFIELD: Science education in Europe: Critical Reflections. Nuffield Foundation. King´s College. London. •Pérez-Cáceres, F.J. (2014). PIIISA: Project to introduce research and innovation into secondary schools in Andalucía. The young science in search of the future…or viceversa. En A. Romero, T. Ramiro y M.P. Bermúdez (coords.). Actas del II Congreso Internacional de Ciencias de la Educación y del Desarrollo, 468. Universidad de Granada. •ROCARD. 2007. Informe ROCARD: Science Education Now: A renewed Pedagogy for the Future of Europe. European Communities. Belgium. •Shulman, L.S. (1986). Those Who Understand: Knowledge growth in teaching, Educational Researcher, 15 (2), pp. 4-14. •Weick, K.E., Sutcliffe, K. M., Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and Process of Sensemaking. Organization Science, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 409-421. •Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.