New Perspectives in Science Education

This work focuses on Science teaching at high school using the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as  methodology. In the last years the CLIL teaching methodology became mandatory in Italy for all upper secondary schools. However, there are still difficulties for its implementation. Some of them are here reported: i) short number of CLIL trained teachers, ii) lack of appropriate teaching materials; iii) many experienced teachers find overwhelming to cope with the great responsibility to plan a  CLIL unit and experiment in class and evaluate both the linguistic and cognitive results. Our work will contribute to the creation of innovative materials for CLIL scientific courses in the field of biology, by including updated topics that  also contain ethical and societal challenges such as: genetic inheritance, stem cells, and cloning. Bioethics debates give to the students an opportunity to cope with some of the most challenging and engaging ethical issues that our society is facing as a direct  consequence of advances in the life sciences. In this way science teaching will help students to become better informed and responsible citizens. In order to facilitate and support the work of the teachers, we developed CLIL teaching materials and resources according to the model of the 4C’s (Coyle 1999, Content, Communication, Cognition and Culture). To test the efficacy of our materials and of the CLIL methodology, we delivered our courses to two classes of a science high school, using an e-learning environment. After an initial meeting in  classroom for the project overview, the students started to work in the Moodle e-learning platform of the University of Camerino studying teaching materials and carrying out the proposed activities. Efficacy is currently tested by a statistical analysis of questionnaires and activities. We believe that an e-learning environment may facilitate personalized learning and the use of a large number of interactive multimedia resources. E-learning environment also enables the tracking of all learning activities in order to obtain useful information for the elaboration of experimental data on the efficacy of the methodology.

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