The EU-funded Partnerships for Science Education (PAFSE) project looked at science education as a method to provide the knowledge, tools and skills necessary to make informed decisions on public health challenges. The project aims to involve pupils aged 12 to 15 years old in identifying public health challenges in their local environment, based on an inquiry-based learning process. Topics addressed in the project include road safety, mobility, healthy eating, viruses, epidemics, vaccinations, and noise pollution, among others.
As part of the PAFSE project, Prevenção Rodoviária Portuguesa (PRP) developed three educational scenarios related to the curriculum on traffic safety and mobility education. Each of the educational scenarios includes a project where the pupils are guided by the teacher.
The first scenario focuses on road traffic crashes, where the pupils establish a baseline of the local situation through behavioural observations. The second scenario focuses on risk factors, where the pupils gather self-declared attitudes and behaviours as a project. The third scenario then focuses on sustainable mobility, and pupils identify and analyse school mobility patterns through questionnaires. The scenarios will be made available in a repository on the Photodentro web-platform.
The pupils present their findings to the local community, stakeholders and the scientific community, and together define strategies to address these challenges. Each educational scenario is evaluated from the perspective of the impact on attitudes and behaviours, as well as from the perspective of increasing pupils’ interest in pursuing scientific disciplines. Teachers are furthermore trained to implement the educational scenarios.
The PAFSE project was presented during the 2022 European Traffic Education Seminar.
More Information
More information on the PAFSE project can be found on its website: https://pafse.eu/
The Partnerships for Science Education (PAFSE) project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. More information on Horizon 2020 is available on the archived website. Horizon 2020 was followed up by Horizon Europe as the EU’s funding program for research and innovation.