The universe is like a soccer ball - or is it?

Are we alone in the universe? Why does hot water freeze faster than cold water? And why can't monkeys actually speak? Questions like these are among the unsolved mysteries of natural science and hold a hitherto underutilized potential for awakening pupils' interest in science. Based on this, a didactic model (NaWiKon) was developed in the Sparkling Science project "The universe is like a soccer - or is it?", which enables the discussion of unsolved questions of natural science via authentic scientific texts by simulating a scientific publication process.

As part of the NaWiKon model, pupils first receive scientific texts with different positions on a scientific controversy and structure the complex input in partner work. They then process the knowledge they have acquired into their own scientific arguments. The resulting text products are reviewed by other students as part of a multi-step peer review process and then revised.

The model, including materials, was published following the project and can be downloaded free of charge. It can help to ensure that the promotion of academic text literacy is more strongly implemented in regular lessons and takes place gradually from the 10th grade onwards, so that in future pupils can be better prepared not only for the VWA, but also for university studies.

A particular aim of the project was also to actively involve pupils in the scientific process. To this end, the best texts were submitted to the Young Science Magazine and published after a positive review. In addition, all pupils involved in the project had the opportunity to apply for the Sparkling Science Summer School at the University of Graz. The 8 winners of the competition took part in the scientific data preparation and analysis process in summer 2018 and were trained as VWA coaches.

The NaWiKon model was empirically evaluated as part of the project "The universe is like a soccer - or is it?". The results show statistically significant improvements for pupils in all linguistic areas. The texts after the intervention were not only rated better by experts in writing didactics in terms of overall impression, but also contain a higher degree of language usage that is common in science.