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

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About the project

Our research has involved working with a small group of secondary teachers, recruited in pairs of mathematics and science specialists from the same school, to co-design computer-based modelling tools in which they may explore and interrogate their own knowledge of risk, and how they deal with it in their classrooms. Our aim is not to provide teachers with ready-made tools or approaches to teaching risk, but to use their experiences of working on modelling tools and tasks to develop a deeper understanding of the pedagogy of risk, which in later research (subject to further funding) will develop into tools and activities aimed at classroom use.

Science education in the UK has done more than mathematics education to engage with risk and the 'socio-scientific' dimension of scientific ideas; the matter became very pressing in the last ten or so years, given a number of science policy 'disasters', such as BSE 'mad cow' disease, and Genetically Modified foods, which contributed to a huge public distrust of scientific knowledge and practice. In contrast, mathematics education is still in a state of relative 'purity', it being still quite acceptable to assert that mathematics can be value or context-free. Statistics education has engaged more deeply and systematically with issues of context and meaning (in terms of ideas such as statistical literacy), given that statistics has an explicit relationship with context that mathematics in general avoids.

Our findings from consultations with teachers suggest that the topic of risk in the science classroom is usually handled with a focus on the 'social' dimension of socio-scientific issues, such as how the popular media (mis)represents scientific knowledge and practice, and this is used to underline how scientific method deals with risk and uncertainty. What seems largely absent is any quantified approach involving numerical probabilistic information or mathematical modelling of risk, which we take to be essential for understanding risk. From the mathematics side, teachers report that probability and statistics is experienced as a frequently dull topic for students, in which it is very difficult to get beyond artificial situations for learning. Risk was introduced explicitly into the Mathematics National Curriculum of England for the first time in 2008, with an explicit aim of motivating realistic applications of mathematics, but there has yet to be any detailed guidance for teachers about how and what to teach, and the social nature of risk and the 'fuzzy' nature of personal values can be expected to be challenging for mathematics teachers.

These findings suggest that the concept of risk should be a rich location for cross-curricular working where both mathematics and science teachers will have something to gain. You can read several publications on this site where we describe our initial experiments.

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