Promoting Active Citizenship in Mathematics and Science Teaching

Abstract

The world is facing severe global challenges such as climate change, food security, rising migration, social justice, or the current corona crisis. In these times, citizenship education seems more important than ever. How can this citizenship education relate to mathematics and science learning? The research project MaSDiV (Supporting mathematics and science teachers in addressing diversity and promoting fundamental values) connected mathematics and science with citizenship education by modeling real-life problems relevant to society. In this paper, we present the foundational design features of the PD course as well the results from the accompanying evaluation of this PD course, which was implemented by partners in six countries to support teachers in connecting mathematics and science education with citizenship education. More specifically, we investigate how participating teachers experienced the PD program; how their self-efficacy beliefs, learning-related beliefs, as well as teaching practices change; and which factors contributed to that change. In order to investigate the outcome of the PD program, we surveyed N = 311 mathematics and science teachers’ pre- and post-participation of the PD in six different European countries. Among others, our results show that in general, most participating teachers reported a high overall satisfaction with the course across all six participating countries. They also indicate that teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs about using relevant contexts, their learning-related beliefs about the benefits of using contexts, as well as their own teaching practice changed significantly after participating in the MaSDiV PD course.