From 21st to 25th August, DCU co-hosted the European Science Education Research Association conference (ESERA 2017) which saw nearly 1,500 STEM education researchers and teachers from 75 countries visit DCU.
The organisation of the ESERA 2017 conference was led by STEM Education Professors Eilish McLoughlin, Odilla Finlayson, Sibel Erduran and Peter Childs from the Irish STEM education research centres CASTeL, based in DCU, and Epi-Stem.
The theme of the ESERA 2017 conference, Research, Practice and Collaboration in Science Education underlined aspects of great relevance in contemporary STEM education research: the need to reflect on different approaches to enhancing our knowledge of learning processes and the role of context, designed or circumstantial, formal or informal, in STEM teaching and learning.
2017 has become a landmark year in the history of STEM education in Ireland with the development of a national STEM education policy building on the recommendations of the STEM Education review report.
CASTeL researchers at DCU have been at the forefront of advancing national research and practice in STEM education since 2000 and in 2017 have hosted a trilogy of international STEM education conferences that have attracted over 2,600 international researchers to Dublin.
The ESERA 2017 conference followed on from the hugely successful GIREP-ICPE-EPEC trio of international conferences in physics education held in DCU in July and the Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME) held in Croke Park in February.
