New Perspectives in Science Education

Within the last decade various efforts have been made to bring science and society closer together and scientists are put on the spot to provide insight to their work. More and more research funding associations worldwide ask scientists to include activities into their research projects to demonstrate broader impacts on science and society [1]. Since 2008 the Austrian Ministry of Research has been running a funding scheme called “Sparkling Science” asking scientist to do research in cooperation with pupils and teachers. Sparkling Science research projects are therefore not only focussing on publishable scientific outcomes but participating pupils should be included in reasonable research tasks. These activities aim to bring real world science to students and teachers, to promote science learning in schools, to increase scientist´s engagement with the wider community, stimulate student´s interest in science as well as broaden their understanding of the variety of science related careers. This paper will provide insight into a currently running Sparkling Science project called “Vielfalter”- Establishing an Austrian Wide Monitoring of Diurnal Butterflies which was launched in 2013 and will continue until December 2015. The project vision is to establish a network of people engaging in monitoring butterflies all over the country. As one of the first steps “Vielfalter” is aiming to establish a lasting purpose driven cooperation between involved partners as well as with school children. Thus it is important to find out whether and how student’s motivation to engage in butterfly monitoring develops in course of their first year of participation and which project specific factors might be crucial to support continuous student engagement. 177 students completed the “Short Scale of Intrinsic Motivation Inventory” published by Wilde and colleagues [2] before and after participating in the project. This questionnaire represents the factors interest/enjoyment, perceived competence, perceived choice and pressure/tension with three items each and allows us to apply statistical tests to find out whether significant changes in these items are observable. In addition 19 students were selected to participate in semis structured interviews conducted at the end of the first project year to get a better insight into students individual development. This paper reports on outcomes visible after the first year and provides insight into how student experience such an authentic research setting as well as which surrounding conditions seem to be important to maintain student engagement.