Evaluation

The Vaccinations Debate Kit discusses whether children should be required to have all their vaccinations before they can go to school.

This debate kit was funded by e-Bug (a project operated by Public Health England) and Science Foundation Ireland. Gallomanor collaborated with E-Bug to research the kit, and asked for advice from teachers to ensure its educational suitability.

3,000 kits were printed in March 2015: 1,000 were distributed by e-Bug and 2,000 by Gallomanor. We have just finished our evaluation on these kits. And this is what we’ve learnt:

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The Antibiotic Resistance Debate Kit discusses whether the NHS should tell GPs to give back-up prescriptions instead of immediate antibiotics wherever possible.

The kit was funded by e-Bug (a project operated by Public Health England) and Science Foundation Ireland. Its main distribution took part between October 2014 and January 2015, and we have evaluated it between September and November 2015. After the evaluation, we’ve learnt: Continue reading →

The Big Data Debate Kit was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland.

The kit discusses whether we should sequence the genomes of one million people, to find out more about living longer and healthier lives.

After evaluating it we found out that:

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It’s been a year since we launched our Electricity Distribution Debate Kit. We emailed all the 810 teachers who requested it, and followed them up with reminder emails and letters to collect feedback. We then analysed it and this is what we’ve found out:

• Hard copies of the kit were sent to 810 teachers who requested them,  687 were sent to STEM Contract Holders, and the rest were distributed among different teacher networks. The kit was also downloaded by 242 different users.
• We estimate that the kit was used by 29% of the teachers who requested it.
• Every teacher who filled in the feedback survey found the kit to be an “excellent” or “pretty good” educational resource.
• 97% of teachers feel their students know more about Electricity Distribution after using the kit.
• We measured how the students reflected on the issues surrounding electricity distribution and actually changed their minds throughout the debate.

You can read the full evaluation report here (PDF). Continue reading →

Back in 2008, as part of the I’m a Scientist pilot, we developed our first ever debate kit and sent it out to all teachers taking part. By 2010 we’d produced 3 more kits but then had a bit of a lull, and teachers started asking for new topics to debate in their classroom. So, what better topic for a new kit than Drugs in Sport, in the year of the London 2012 Olympics. Well that’s what we thought, as did The Physiological Society who funded it. When it came time to evaluate the debate kit this was therefore one of the main questions to answer. Was Drugs in Sport a good topic for a debate kit? Another key question was How many of the Drugs in Sport debate kits sent out were used? We’ve emailed teachers we sent kits to, and sent letters asking for their feedback. From their responses … Continue reading →

Reading through the draft copy for this latest debate kit made me smile.  It was very good.  Sure, I’m a bit of an Olympics geek and general armchair sportsman, but I felt it provided great angles to debate a very contentious, yet easy to grasp, scientific issue – Drugs in Sport. It seems as though I’m not the only one who likes the sound of it. This is a quick update on how we are distributing the 2,000 kits that we have printed. Previous recipients of debate kits The first 4 debate kits enabled us to build a decent list of teachers who wanted them. Our evaluation showed that the kits were well used, but the last one to get posted out was in June 2010 so we thought it appropriate to ask those teachers to opt in to get the next one. We emailed the 1,543 people on that … Continue reading →