More than a thousand science and mathematics teachers will troop to the regional centers of excellence for science education this summer to learn the core of the subjects they are teaching. Project Rescue Initiatives in Science Education or RISE is giving practicing mentors in elementary and secondary schools a chance to get formal training that will provide them with content knowledge which they did not have as pre-service education students. The project, which seeks to train non-majors who are already in the mainstream of the public school system, targets to train 1,085 teachers for the following subjects: Elementary Science Grades 3 & 4; Elementary Science Grades 5 & 6; Elementary Math Grades 3 &4; Elementary Math Grades 5 & 6; General Science; Biology; Chemistry; Physics, Secondary Math I & II; and Secondary Math III & IV. The selected participants will get free tuition fee, stipend, teaching materials & book allowance, and a round trip transportation allowance to and from the venue.

The training program will run for 180 hours and will be conducted in 16 teacher training institutions, most of which have been designated as Regional Science Teaching Centers or RSTCs. The Science Education Institute (SEI) of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), in collaboration with the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), has been implementing Project RISE for five years now. This is being done to substantially increase the number of qualified science and math teachers in the public school system. Currently, many science and mathematics teachers in the schools are non-majors in the subject areas they are teaching, thus having very little of the content knowledge required to teach the subjects effectively. This is one major factor identified as contributing to student' falling short of the expected performance level and, generally, to the dismal performance of Filipino students against their international counterparts.

Project RISE has so far trained 13,653 science and math teachers since it was first implemented in 1998. The SEI-DOST, together with DepEd, CHED and Teacher Education Institutions, committed to provide support to the project under The Science and Technology Education Plan (2001-2005) or STEP 2 through the strategic agenda on Education Training and Development. Project RISE, together with other science education programs, is envisioned to provide a better quality science education for the Filipinos thereby giving them the opportunity to live productive lives and contribute to the national economy.