New Perspectives in Science Education

Methodical and social competencies cannot be trained successfully and sustainably exclusively in courses that deal with these competencies themselves, e.g. giving and receiving feedback. On the contrary, they require an active engagement with authentic situations from the respective discipline. Because it is the students' handling of the subject content that promotes and controls the development of these competences - and not their translation into content. The course presented here was designed with these aspects in mind.
In fact, it is even much more complex: starting from the idea of preparing playful learning how to learning, several didactic principles have been combined in the design of this course, such as: inverted classroom, peer review, product-related learning, explorative learning and formative versus summative assessment. The students should experience a learning situation in their own research within the framework of this course, which is designed according to all these didactic principles.
At the moment this is the fifth time the course has been conducted in this way. In the meantime, the principles and processes seem to be largely established and standardized. The prerequisites have been created and the participants can work very independently (by default in pairs) by processing their defined tasks. There are only two compulsory attendance sessions: the first and the last. The other four to five meetings are optional. Those who wish to receive oral feedback on their interim results and further advice take part. Everyone else prefers to save time and to work on their papers.
Students who have completed the course are more and more inclined to give a consistent positive feedback. Others - who were unfamiliar with this extremely self-responsible way of learning - had always left the course very early. Although students may spend as much (or as little) time on this course as they want, it seems that most of them are motivated to do more than average in other courses.
Let us now turn to the key point of this paper: Although the course is designed for students at a technical university, it is not a science lesson. But, according to the author, the principles and processes effective in this course will also work successfully in any other course that defines the application of methodological and theoretical knowledge to concrete practical situations as a learning outcome. Whenever students are asked to solve authentic problems (or learn how to solve them), the didactic scheme presented in this paper will work - if teachers implement it in the right and in a consistent way.

Keywords: Inverted classroom, peer review, product oriented learning, game-based learning, formative assessement.

References:
[1] Handke, J. (2013). Beyond a Simple ICM. Handke, J., Kiesler, N., Wiemeyer, L. (Eds.): The Inverted Classroom Model. The 2nd German ICM-Conference – Proceedings, Oldenburg-Verlag, München 2013, pp 15-22.