The University of Tartu (UTARTU), founded in 1632, is the oldest, largest and major university in Estonia. It is classified as a research University with 10 Faculties, approximately 3000 researchers and administrative staff and 15 000 students.
The Centre for Science Education is located within the Faculty of Science and Technology. It is involved in teaching pre-service teachers across all science subjects, conducting in-service teacher courses and carrying out research. Since 2003, the centre has been the leading a number of governmentally-funded (Ministry of Education and Science) research projects which have involved also other Estonian universities. It is the only centre in Estonia and the Baltic States running PhD programme in science education. It has developed considerable research expertise in the area of scientific and technological literacy (STL) and in science education generally through heading research projects, running workshops and research and teaching conferences both international (IOSTE, EARLI, ICASE) and nationally. The Centre currently hosts the Biology, Chemistry, Science and Geography teacher associations for Estonia. It also edits the publication, “Journal for Estonian Science Teachers” about new trends in science and technology education. Centre staff has been heavily involved in developing teaching-learning materials in Estonia. The Centre has been and is involved in a number of European projects such as FP6 project on Raising the Popularity and Relevance of science education (SAS6-CT-2006-042922-PARSEL), Comenius projects such as SySTEM and EuSTD-Web (ongoing).
Role in the Project: drawing on their experience with pre-service and in-service training of teachers, UTARTU will contribute to each of the WPs, in particular to the development of instruments for feedback (WP6), development of international networks (WP2) and the dissemination of existing teaching materials (WP9).