About the conference

The conference about project-based education and other student-activation strategies and issues in STE(A)M has been organised at the Department of Chemistry and Chemistry Education, Faculty of Education, Charles University with support of other departments focused on teacher training. Pre-service training is crucial to promote these methods oriented on students’ activity effectively. Based on empirical data, it is obvious that activating strategies need to be trained in pre-service teacher training as teachers who have not tried these activities themselves are unlikely to apply them in their future practice. At the same time, it seems that applying these strategies (namely project-based and inquiry-based education) requires gradual steps. Students need to get used to growing autonomy of their own learning step by step. From the teachers’ competences point of view it is important to choose appropriate amount of scaffolding and its successive decreasing.

Contributions of both practical and theoretical nature in this respect offer an increasingly broader information platform. The outcomes of the conference are aimed at both practice and research, so not only examples of good practice, but also evidence of the effectiveness of specific activities would help expand the number of teachers and researchers focusing on this area.