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

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This is a 21-month research project at the Institute of Education (running until May 2010), funded by the Wellcome Trust.

We are investigating how mathematics and science teachers make sense of the concept of risk, how the concept figures in their teaching (at upper secondary level, approximately ages 14 to 17), and what new possibilities exist for teaching where a cross-curricular and technology-enhanced approach is taken. Risk has become a growing issue for mathematics and science education in the UK, as curricula have come to include risk and its societal role, but risk is a difficult topic for teachers and the detailed questions about what and how to teach remain (for mathematics especially) largely unanswered.

The project is establishing pedagogical principles, and developing 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 want 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
Dr Ramesh Kapadia (Visiting Professorial Fellow)

Also involved: Hasan Akyuzlu, PhD student at the IOE

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

Website last updated: 19 November 2009 by PK

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