Developing Bridging Courses for Mathematics and Science Teacher Students - Bridge2Teach



       

Almost all teacher training institutions, and particularly universities involved in initial teacher training, have introduced so-called bridging courses at or near the beginning of their study programmes for prospective mathematics and science teachers (a bridging course thereby means a course that is designed to bridge the gap between what was learned in school and what is needed at university. However, the vast majority of such courses have been developed by mathematicians, scientists and other tertiary-level research/teaching staff, having mainly mathematics and science undergraduate students in mind, and not so much teacher students in these subjects. Mathematics and science educators were often not involved in the design and are rarely involved in the teaching of these courses. At some universities, there is the same bridging course both for mathematics/science undergraduate students and for mathematics/science teacher students. At other universities, there are separate bridging courses for teacher students, but they are just simplified versions of the courses for undergraduate students. These facts take away most of the advantages that bridging courses are supposed to have for the teacher students. The partner universities are all well- established teacher training institutions and have found that, while their current bridging courses helped reducing the drop-out rate for their mathematics and science undergraduate students, they barely affected the drop-out rates of the mathematics and science teacher students.


It is therefore the objective of this project to:
- develop, test, revise, finalise and disseminate materials for a bridging course for mathematics teacher students and a bridging course for science teacher students,

- provide workshops for teacher trainers and for university staff who deliver bridging courses to mathematics and science students, demonstrating and working on how they can use these materials in their own mathematics and science teacher training bridging courses.