Didactics of Chemistry - Projects

International Symposia on chemical and science education at the universities of Dortmund and Bremen

The symposia on Chemistry and Science Education continue a long tradition which started in 1981 at the University of Dortmund. In the first fifteen years the symposia had been organized by Hans-Jürgen Schmidt. Some of these symposia were of national character, but starting from 1988 over nearly a decade there were international symposia every two years organized in Dortmund focussing on empirical research in science education. These international symposia were organized in cooperation with the International Council of the Associations for Science Education (ICASE). After the retirement of Hans-Jürgen Schmidt in 1996, Bernd Ralle and Ingo Eilks restarted the tradition of international symposia on science education at the University of Dortmund again. After one national symposium in 2000, in 2002 and 2004 the Universities of Dortmund and Bremen cooperatively organized international symposia under the titles â??Research in chemical education â?? What does this mean?â?? and â??Quality in practice-oriented research in science educationâ??. Both the symposia attracted people from all over Europe and beyond. Due to the generous support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and a couple of further sponsors, the symposia of the last years became more and more international and recognized again. The idea of inviting speakers with different backgrounds (from the different areas of science education research or research in general education), with different degrees of experience (from young researchers to experienced researchers), from different traditions of how to do research in education (from more quantitative to more qualitative) proved to be an interesting frame for these kind of symposia. This frame offered a big potential for interesting discussions and allowed bringing people from different backgrounds closer to one another. The last symposium in 2006 at the University of Bremen continued these efforts under the title "Towards research-based science teacher education" attracting about 100 persons from five continents.

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