The first blog-post about teachers’ attitudes related to RRI teaching dealt with results in IRRESISTIBLE’s first round. Even though the model could identify four different profile types, most teachers (58%) fell in the category of a ‘co-operator’. This means that teachers are willing to work and collaborate about RRI teaching but are not overly excited about it. However, this result is not entirely satisfactory because there was a possibility that the questionnaire did not differentiate teachers in a realistic way. This suspicion rose partly from the observation that many of the questionnaire items had a ceiling effect and some items had high ‘I cannot say’-percentages. There were also many other ideas on how to improve the questionnaire.

 

The questionnaire and the concern model saw many improvements for 2nd round. Concerns were divided into positive and negative concerns in different categories. For example, an interest to develop content knowledge is a positive competency concern, were as a belief that RRI does not belong in schools is a negative consequence concern. Items for each category were chosen based on the old questionnaire, and new items were formulated. The changes were first tested and analyzed on 157 IRRESISTIBLE teachers in the fall of 2015. The changes meant that we had to find a new way to interpret the results.

We came up with four concern types and four interest types based on a cluster analysis. One concern type had no concerns what so ever while another one had very high intensities of concerns in nearly all of the stages. In the positive interest side some were lacking interests to develop oneself while others had no interest in collaboration. There are of course 16 possible combinations of the four interest and concern types. By looking at teachers individually we can determine which of the 16 concern profile types they belong to. The six most common profile types were the Realist, the Enthusiast, the Headstrong, the Tame, the Reformer and the Unsure. All of these profiles have their specific traits. For example the Headstrong does not want to collaborate and gives a lot of attention to practical details, consequence and refocusing. The Enthusiast is very interested in RRI in all categories but does not have any concerns what so ever. The Tame is also lacking in concerns but has also low intensities of interests towards RRI teaching. The Reformer is skeptical but highly interested towards RRI teaching and the Unsure is concerned about practical issues and uninterested towards developing oneself. The most common group were the Realists who do not have particularly high interests towards RRI and are most of all concerned with informational and practical concerns.

Some data and a lot of analysis still remains to be done before final conclusions, but it is already quite safe to say that we succeeded with developing C-BAM. We have seen that teachers are not a heterogenic group and during a professional development period they need support in different areas. One teacher needs more motivation, another needs more clarification about practical issues while a third one needs possibilities to affect the development process. C-BAM helps to better understand this process which could help in the diffusion of RRI around Europe. The questionnaire is also transferable to all teachers in all countries, in all school levels and in all subjects.