Eureka! Engaging classroom students in inquiry-based science lessons using local experts and contexts

This article illustrates an enhancement and lesson-delivery process used to engage classroom students in primary school science lessons. In the enhancement process, university educators and pre-service teachers collaborated with local experts to prepare lessons based in local or regional contexts. Lessons were designed to enable students to think like scientists in inquiry-based or problem-solving tasks. The enhancement process, along with a reflection process, was developed as part of the project: It's Part of My Life: Engaging university and community to enhance science and mathematics education (IPOML). This collaborative project, undertaken from 2013 to 2017 across six regional universities, aimed to improve the confidence of pre-service teachers of mathematics and science and address the lack of student interest in these subjects. As well as providing an overview of the project, this article illustrates the sequential process of enhancement, followed by a teaching lesson and reflection using two exemplar lessons designed for Year 5 and 6 students. These project processes, acting sequentially and repeated in several iterations, identify ways that teachers can engage their students in broad aspects of the Australian Curriculum: Science. Classroom students and pre-service teachers experienced 'eureka' moments during this process, not only because one of the topics was based around gold. [Author abstract]