A Pathway to Inquiry-Based Teaching: Digital Knowledge Transfer from Natural History Museums to School Classrooms

摘要

The objective of the three-year European project (acronym: PATHWAY) with its 25 partner organizations is to set the pathway toward a standard-based approach to teaching science by inquiry. The project focuses on (i) supporting the adoption of inquiry teaching by demonstrating ways to reduce the constrains presented by teachers and school organizations, (ii) demonstrating and disseminating methods and exemplary cases of both effective introduction of inquiry to science classrooms and professional development programs, as well as (iii) delivering a guideline set for the educational community to further explore and exploit the unique benefits of the proposed approach in science teaching. In this way, the project team aims to facilitate the development of communities of practitioners of inquiry that will enable teachers to learn from each other. Out of about 50 selected Best Practice examples within the Pathway project, one specific approach labeled Natural Europe is linking museums and school classrooms, and thus harvesting the potential of digital libraries in natural history museums as a very attractive option. An impressive abundance of high quality digital contents still remains largely unexploited due to a number of barriers, such as: the lack of interconnection and interoperability, the lack of centralized access as well as the inefficiency of current content organization and the metadata used. First empirical evidence supports this pathway to bridge the gap between formal and informal education by specifically using the proposed digital bridge.