The TURS project:
Promoting Teachers’ Understanding of Risk in Socio-Scientific Issues

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This is an 18-month research project at the Institute of Education (running until February 2010), funded by the Wellcome Trust, which is investigating the teaching of risk in secondary science and mathematics.

Risk is an increasingly key part of political and public policy discourse, and this is reflected in recent changes to science and mathematics curricula. However, there is almost no established pedagogy of risk that teachers may draw on to deal with topics that they find very challenging to work with in the classroom. This project aims to establish pedagogical principles and to develop software simulation tools to provide teachers with practical support. Through working with teacher partners (in pairs of mathematics and science specialists) for the duration of the project, we hope to understand the processes of change in the teachers’ understanding as they engage, in a multi-disciplinary way, with the ideas of risk.

Research Team

Professor Dave Pratt, Co-director
Dr Ralph Levinson, Co-director
Dr Phillip Kent, Researcher
Cristina Yogui, Part-time researcher

Also involved:
Ramesh Kapadia, Visiting Professorial Fellow at the IOE
Hasan Akyuzlu, PhD student at the IOE

This project is supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, number WT084895MA.

Website last updated: 14 November 2008 by PK

TURS Project | Department of Geography, Enterprise, Mathematics and Science
Institute of Education | University of London