It's part of my life: engaging university and community to enhance science and mathematics education: Final report

This project is designed to improve mathematics and science teaching in Australian schools by engaging pre-service teachers with the mathematics and science that underpins everyday life in Australian regional communities. The project draws together the strengths of university mathematicians, scientists, and specialist educators to enhance the higher education mathematics and science education curriculum framework by grounding it in the practical contexts that are an integral part of our daily lives. In so doing, 'It's part of my life' addresses two critical issues in mathematics and science education: lack of teacher confidence, and lack of student interest. Along with a flexible and adaptive, scalable model for embedding real-world contexts and related teaching strategies into curriculum, project outcomes include an open educational resource of evaluated and documented real-life scenarios for inclusion in curriculum across all educational levels, tools for evaluating new scenarios, and increased networking amongst university researchers, specialist educators and members of the wider community.