Sustaining and expanding Open Schooling: MULTIPLIERS’ key policy recommendations
How can policymakers support Open Schooling initiatives and improve science learning by fostering collaboration between schools, society and scientific institutions?
Throughout the past three years, MULTIPLIERS has demonstrated the effectiveness of Open Schooling Communities in addressing socio-scientific issues and enhancing student engagement with science. Sustaining these networks and supporting the establishment of further communities in Europe are now our top priorities as the EU-funded phase of the project draws to a close.
To highlight key findings of the project and strategies for policymakers and educators to foster, maintain and expand Open Schooling, MULTIPLIERS is proud to present our new series of policy briefs:
- Policy Brief 1: How can an operational definition of Open Schooling help us in transforming society? This document outlines the project’s objectives and provides a brief overview of our operational definition of Open Schooling. It discusses how such definition can serve as a foundation for developing a unified approach to establishing Open Schooling communities and creating evaluation tools to assess their effectiveness.
- Policy Brief 2: Making school science relevant to real-world challenges through Open Schooling Science learning projects. This Policy Brief presents the MULTIPLIERS Open Schooling Science Learning Framework, sharing insights to inform the design of teaching and learning activities and practical recommendations to enrich pedagogical approaches in school science.
- Policy Brief 3: Open Schooling Science learning projects foster students’ interest in science, ownership of their learning and science career awareness. Our third Policy Brief summarises the project’s main results, successful methodologies and approaches gained from the MULTIPLIERS educational activities to foster students’ interest, self-efficacy and career awareness in science. It advocates for policymakers’ support in fostering student engagement with real-world, local socio-scientific issues, local experts and authentic information. This can collectively contribute to the development of essential skills such as critical thinking and argumentation.
- Policy Brief 4: Building and Sustaining Open Schooling Networks: Ensuring Long-term Impact of Collaborative Science Education. This document highlights key strategies for policymakers and educators to maintain and expand Open Schooling initiatives. These are presented as part of MULTIPLIERS’ “5 Co”-Model, a comprehensive framework based on extensive research and collaboration.
The four policy briefs were authored by project participants from the Universities of Bonn, Cyprus, Ljubljana, Umeå, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the utility company IREN.
