STEM Education in Newton Rooms: Students Learning in Group Work; Process, Content and Social Organisation.

STEM Education in Newton Rooms: Students' Learning in Group Work; Process, Content and Social Organisation. A Newton-room is a learning facility shared by schools and kindergartens in a geographical area. The rooms are owned by school owners and are equipped with state-of-the art equipment for STEM education and teachers with specific training to teach the modules that are offered in each room. Each module builds on competence aims from the national curriculum in the relevant subject or subjects. Pupils do preparatory work before coming to the Newton room for a specific module, for instance on Energy, on Robotics, or perhaps on Aurora Borealis, and they continue work after the visit when they are back at school. The current research project cooperates with the foundation First Scandinavia, which is the founder and owner of the Newton-room concept and an international network consisting of researchers from IPN, Leibnitz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, Kiel, Germany, and University College Copenhagen, Denmark. The primary objective of the project is to develop knowledge of how group work in an activity-rich and inquiry-based learning environment can be designed to facilitate deep learning in STEM subjects. The secondary objectives are: to understand how roles and knowledge are constructed and negotiated in the social interaction of group work, and how this process affects student-student cooperation and deep-learning opportunities; to identify how content, resources, and tasks in Newton-modules are best designed to support deep-learning processes; and to determine how school activities, both before and after Newton-Room visits, can enhance Newton-Room group work and deep-learning potentialities. The project applies a research design inspired by Lesson Study and makes use of video observations, video-stimulated recall interviews with Newton teachers as well as qualitative interviews with visiting pupils and their teachers. The project is an integral part of the research group Learning in Interaction at Nord university. The project started in full in the autumn of 2021 and has been extended until the end of 2026. So far, a PhD student (started October 2021) and a post-doc candidate (started 15 October 2022) have been recruited. The second round of data collection has been completed and the analysis work is well under way. Findings are presented and discussed at seminars with national and international partners every year. The first seminar was held in Brumunddal in December 2022, while this year's seminar will be held at the Kieler Forschungswerkstatt, Kiel, Germany in December 2023. The plan for the last round of data collection is in place, and a separate website has been established where activities and results from the project are updated is presented. Link to website: https://site.nord.no/newton

Norwegian education authorities have for several decades initiated measures to improve the dire situation with STEM subjects, including cooperation with the business sector to promote interests within compulsory education. One such development is the work initiated by FIRST Scandinavia, a collaboration between school owners and businesses, that provides practice-oriented approaches to STEM education through Newton Rooms. Newton Rooms are learning arenas with state-of-the-art equipment and specially trained teachers who engage with pupils in exploratory, student-active thematic modules. The current applicants have already completed a preparatory project to explore research possibilities into Newton Rooms, and they have uncovered a significant challenge in these spaces surrounding group work: results indicated that group work, cooperation, and the negotiation of shared pedagogical foci is not a straight-forward practice when pupils organise themselves in group work in Newton Room. Such issues form the basis for our investigations in the proposed project, since group activities are a common way of organising work in school, but are still under researched. The current project will study three different Newton modules together with Newton teachers and explore how the modules can be improved to facilitate high quality group work and to stimulate pupils´ “deep learning.” The methodology includes video observations of teaching in Newton modules, video-stimulated recall interviews with Newton teachers, as well as qualitative interviews with class teachers and students to research how preparatory and follow-up work in the modules are perceived and carried out. Workshops with Newton teachers and partners form the basis for the innovative element of the project in which video and interview data will be used to stimulate module revisions, and findings from the project will be shared regularly in the existing network of Newton-teachers.