Designing discipline-specific roles for interdisciplinary learning: two comparative cases in an afterschool STEM + L programme

The current K-12 educational system often does not engage students in interdisciplinary learning. To address this need, we developed an integrated STEM?+?L (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Digital Literacies) afterschool programme in which middle school students took discipline-specific roles (writer, scientist, artist, and engineer) and worked in small groups to produce multimodal science fictions. The study aims to investigate the effect of discipline-specific roles on students’ interdisciplinary and collaborative learning processes. Two groups were chosen as comparison cases because their final products indicated low and high levels in integrating science and literacy respectively. Analysing and visualising students’ individual role-changing patterns and examining their discourse in role-specific interactions revealed the following features for high-quality interdisciplinary learning: (1) Students need to be willing and able to enact not only expected roles, but also other roles; (2) Students need to develop awareness of their own and others’ role enactment; (3) Collaboration between students with different roles may follow a possible trajectory from solo-construction, to co-construction, to re-construction. This study also proposes instructional strategies related to the design of discipline-specific roles to facilitate interdisciplinary learning in STEM education.     

Black girls speak STEM: Counterstories of informal and formal learning experiences

This study presents the interpretations and perceptions of Black girls who participated in I AM STEM—a community-based informal science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) program. Using narrative inquiry, participants generated detailed accounts of their informal and formal STEM learning experiences. Critical race methodology informed this research to portray the dynamic and complex experiences of girls of color, whose stories have historically been silenced and misrepresented. The data sources for this qualitative study included individual interviews, student reflection journals, samples of student work, and researcher memos, which were triangulated to produce six robust counterstories. Excerpts of the counterstories are presented in this article. The major findings of this research revealed that I AM STEM ignited an interest in STEM learning through field trips and direct engagement in scientific phenomena that allowed the girls to become agentic in continuing their engagement in STEM activities throughout the year. This call to awaken the voices of Black girls to speak casts light on their experiences and challenges as STEM learners—from their perspectives. The findings confirm that when credence and counterspaces are given to Black girls, they are poised to reveal their luster toward STEM learning. This study provided a space for Black girls to reflect on their STEM learning experiences, formulate new understandings, and make connections between the informal and formal learning environments within the context of their everyday lives, thus offering a more holistic approach to STEM learning that occurs across settings and over a lifetime.     

SCUBA Diving: Motivating and Mentoring Culturally and Cognitively Diverse Adolescent Girls to Engage in Place-Based Science Enrichment

Abstract

Many bright, talented girls from populations traditionally underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are underachieving or disengaged in school, despite having an interest in STEM. Qualitative research was conducted with teenaged girls from culturally and academically diverse backgrounds participating in an extracurricular scientific diving SCUBA program. The program provided opportunities for these girls to learn and apply STEM knowledge and SCUBA diving skills during research, service learning and place-based, hands-on projects. Findings suggest that motivation for STEM in teenaged girls increases when they are able to participate in real-life, place-based activities they find personally meaningful with other interest-based peers and mentors.     

Paired peer learning through engineering education outreach

ABSTRACT

Undergraduate education incorporating active learning and vicarious experience through education outreach presents a critical opportunity to influence future engineering teaching and practice capabilities. Engineering education outreach activities have been shown to have multiple benefits; increasing interest and engagement with science and engineering for school children, providing teachers with expert contributions to engineering subject knowledge, and developing professional generic skills for engineers such as communication and teamwork. This pilot intervention paired 10 pre-service teachers and 11 student engineers to enact engineering outreach in primary schools, reaching 269 children. A longitudinal mixed methods design was employed to measure change in attitudes and Education Outreach Self-Efficacy in student engineers; alongside attitudes, Teaching Engineering Self-Efficacy and Engineering Subject Knowledge Confidence in pre-service teachers. Highly significant improvements were noted in the pre-service teachers’ confidence and self-efficacy, while both the teachers and engineers qualitatively described benefits arising from the paired peer mentor model.     

STEMulate Engineering Academy: Engaging Students and Teachers in Engineering Practices

Informal science opportunities provide authentic experiences to stimulate students’ interests in science and engineering and foster their curiosity through problem-based investigations. STEMulate Engineering Academy was designed to provide children (Grades 3–5) engineering opportunities and offer teachers a unique professional development experience. The program serves as a practicum experience for teachers seeking a gifted and talented add-on license and the camp also offers free professional development to area teachers. Using a co-teaching approach, students gained firsthand experiences from an engineer in the field, and teachers collaborated with engineers to make the content more relevant. Despite a limited number of contact hours, students and teachers demonstrated growth on pre and post engineering assessments. Informal learning opportunities provided by programs such as STEMulate Engineering Academy could possibly spark student interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)––leading them to a promising career in a STEM field.     

Findings from a Pre-kindergarten Classroom: Making the Case for STEM in Early Childhood Education

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in early childhood education is an area currently given little attention in the literature, which is unfortunate since young children are natural scientists and engineers. Here, we outline our mixed-methods design-based research investigation of a pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) classroom where two early childhood educators are incorporating STEM activities. We used a protocol consisting of a list of potential characteristics of effective and appropriate STEM curriculum for young children to structure our classroom observations. We also used semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and a questionnaire to collect data from multiple stakeholders (teachers, students, and parents), to examine how STEM activities were incorporated in Pre-K, to explore students’ engagement with STEM concepts, and to investigate parents’ opinions about STEM in general and STEM as experienced by their children. Our findings provide support for the inclusion of STEM-based learning experiences for young children.     

Encouraging Girls into Science and Technology with Feminine Role Model: Does This Work?

This study examines the effect of a program that aimed to encourage girls to choose a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career in Israel. The program involved school visits to a high-tech company and meeting with role model female scientists. Sixty ninth-grade female students from a Jewish modern-orthodox single-sex secondary school in the same city as the company participated in the study. The control group contained 30 girls from the same classes who did not participate in the program. Data were collected through pre-post questionnaires, observations, and focus group interviews. It was analyzed for three main themes: perceptions of scientists and engineers, capability of dealing with STEM, and future career choice. Findings indicated respect toward the women scientists as being smart and creative, but significant negative change on the perceptions of women scientists/engineers, the capability of dealing with STEM, and the STEM career choices. Possible causes for these results are discussed, as well as implications for education.     

Understanding gender differences in STEM: Evidence from college applications✰

While education levels of women have increased dramatically relative to men, women are still greatly underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) college programmes. We use unique data on preference rankings for all secondary school students who apply for college in Ireland and detailed information on school subjects and grades to decompose the sources of the gender gap in STEM. We find that, of the 22 percentage points raw gap, about 13 percentage points is explained by differential subject choices and grades in secondary school. Subject choices are more important than grades – we estimate male comparative advantage in STEM (as measured by subject grades) explains about 3 percentage points of the gender gap. Additionally, differences in overall achievement between girls and boys have a negligible effect. Strikingly, there remains a gender gap of 9 percentage points even for persons who have identical preparation at the end of secondary schooling (in terms of both subjects studied and grades achieved); however, this gap is only 4 percentage points for STEM-ready students. We find that gender gaps are smaller among high-achieving students and for students who go to school in more affluent areas. There is no gender gap in science (the large gaps are in engineering and technology), and we also find a smaller gender gap when we include nursing degrees in STEM, showing that the definition of STEM used is an important determinant of the conclusions reached.     

Bringing Up Girls in Science (BUGS): The Effectiveness of an Afterschool Environmental Science Program for Increasing Female Students’ Interest in Science Careers

Bringing Up Girls in Science (BUGS) was an afterschool program for 4th and 5th grade girls that provided authentic learning experiences in environmental science as well as valuable female mentoring opportunities in an effort to increase participants’ academic achievement in science. BUGS participants demonstrated significantly greater amounts of gain in science knowledge as measured by the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in Science (ITBS-S). The original BUGS participants and contrasts have now completed high school and entered college, allowing researchers to assess the long-term impact of the BUGS program. Fourteen former BUGS participants completed two instruments to assess their perceptions of science and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. Their results were compared to four contrast groups composed entirely of females: 12 former BUGS contrasts, 10 college science majors, 10 non-science majors, and 9 current STEM professionals. Results indicate that BUGS participants have higher perceptions of science careers than BUGS contrasts. There were no significant differences between BUGS participants, Science Majors, and STEM professionals in their perceptions of science and STEM careers, whereas the BUGS contrast group was significantly lower than BUGS participants, Science Majors, and STEM Professionals. Additional results and implications are discussed within.     

A STEM extended learning project to raise awareness of social justice in a Year 3 primary classroom

Governments worldwide are advocating for STEM curricula as essential to economic viability but the opportunity for STEM to create a re-envisioned world where there is equal access to wealth, opportunities, and privileges is less prominent. The literature has also not clearly articulated how the combination of the individual disciplines areas: science, technology, engineering and maths should be structured to form a cohesive paradigm within a contextual real-world problem. This paper details one example of a STEM unit had with an equity and social justice agenda. The teacher orchestrated a range of learning experiences to develop student intellectual and emotional engagement with the learning experience sequence, which was to design a pair of shoes for students in a refugee camp using resources that might be available there. Her teaching approach involved the choreography of student attention to the different dimensions of STEM. While all were in play particular disciplinary concepts and practices were foregrounded at different times. We propose that teaching STEM involves a choreography of focus on the different disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, with the relative weight at any one time and overall depending on the nature of the task that is to be accomplished.     

Engineering design in the primary school: applying stem concepts to build an optical instrument

Internationally there is a need for research that focuses on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education to equip students with the skills needed for a rapidly changing future. One way to do this is through designing engineering activities that reflect real-world problems and contextualise students’ learning of STEM concepts. As such, this study examined the learning that occurred when fifth-grade students completed an optical engineering activity using an iterative engineering design model. Through a qualitative methodology using a case study design, we analysed multiple data sources including students’ design sketches from eight focus groups. Three key findings emerged: first, the collaborative process of the first design sketch enabled students to apply core STEM concepts to model construction; second, during the construction stage students used experimentation for the positioning of lenses, mirrors and tubes resulting in a simpler ‘working’ model; and third, the redesign process enabled students to apply structural changes to their design. The engineering design model was useful for structuring stages of design, construction and redesign; however, we suggest a more flexible approach for advanced applications of STEM concepts in the future.     

Adaptive Comparative Judgment as a Tool for Assessing Open-ended Design Problems and Model Eliciting Activities

We investigated the use of adaptive comparative judgment to evaluate the middle school student learning, engagement, and experience with the design process in an open-ended problem assigned in a technology and engineering education course. Our results indicate that the adaptive comparative judgment tool effectively facilitated the grading of the students’ products and improved the judges’ understanding of the processes the students used to arrive at their solutions. We found the reliability and validity of the tool to be acceptable and the outcomes of our study suggest that there is justification for the use of the adaptive comparative judgment method to assess student learning outcomes at multiple levels of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education.     

Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: a critical review

ABSTRACT

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education garnered significant attention in recent years and has emerged as a key field of research globally. The goal of this article is to offer a critical review of how STEM education and its transdisciplinarity were defined and/or positioned in empirical studies published during the early formulation of the field. In particular, we sought to identify how these studies conceptualise learners and learning and portray the underlying assumptions in light of the macrosystemic discourses that often serve as ideological forces in shaping research and practice of STEM education. We examined 154 peer-reviewed articles published between January 2007 and March 2018 and analysed them along several emergent dimensions: their geospatial focus, focal disciplinary areas, methodological and theoretical assumptions, and major findings. Grounded in a critical transdisciplinary perspective, we used critical discourse analysis to identify how macrosystemic and institutionalised forces – overtly and implicitly – shape what counts as STEM education research, including its goals and conceptualisations of learners and learning. Our analysis highlights the need for aesthetic expansion and diversification of STEM education research by challenging the disciplinary hegemonies and calls for reorienting the focus away from human capital discourse.     

“It's Wrong to Exclude Girls From Something They Love.” Adolescents’ Attitudes About Sexism in Science,Technology, Engineering,and Math

The current research examined adolescents’ attitudes about sexism in fields related to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The ethnically diverse sample (61% East Asian) was composed of 629 adolescents (M_age = 16.09) who attended a public school in the United States. Participants responded to closed- and open-ended questions about the prevalence and severity of sexism in STEM. We used latent profile analysis to classify participants into latent classes according to their responses. Of note, one latent class included participants who perceived sexism in STEM as a fairly common and very serious problem. Relative to the other classes, participants in this class were more likely to be girls and showed higher STEM value. Qualitative analyses illustrated that the participants in each class reasoned in fundamentally different ways about sexism in STEM.     

The Single Sex Debate for Girls in Science: a Comparison Between Two Informal Science Programs on Middle School Students’ STEM Identity Formation

Currently, there are policy debates regarding the efficacy and legality of single sex formal and informal education programs. This issue is particularly poignant in science education due to the historical marginalization of women in these fields. This marginalization has resulted in women being positioned as a stigmatized group within many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related fields. Research points to adolescence as the age where this sense of marginalization begins to develop. As a result, policy responses have utilized various frameworks such as: increased access for women, changing pedagogy to address women’s learning styles, changing the language and culture of science to prevent marginalization of stigmatized groups, and finally exploring the role that individual identity plays in the marginalization of women. This study adds to the policy debate as it applies to single sex education by comparing middle school participants’ STEM identity formation during two informal science learning environments (an all girls’ STEM camp and a co-educational STEM camp). Additionally, this study focuses on the influence of camp activities within two informal science education programs: particularly the provision of role models and authentic STEM research activities, as means to improve STEM identity and make these fields relevant to the lives of middle school students. The results indicate that both camps improved girls’ STEM identities. These findings suggest that the single sex environment is not as important to STEM identity as the pedagogy used within the program.     

Adaptive Teaching in STEM: Characteristics for Effectiveness

This article defines the process of adaptive teaching in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). We assert that teachers who possess a well-developed STEM pedagogical content knowledge, a constructivist paradigm of teaching and learning, and an ability to draw on a vision while reflecting on and during teaching to help negotiate challenges are well positioned to engage in the process of adaptive teaching. This article acknowledges the valuable knowledge, skills, and dispositions that novice teachers bring with them as they enter the workforce. To illustrate the process of adaptive teaching in STEM, we use an in-depth case study of a novice teacher. Our conclusion offers a discussion of how teacher educators and those who provide professional development services during induction can best support teachers in their development of becoming adaptive, and therefore, effective.     

指向深度学习的STEM教育探究

在夯实学科知识的基础上,STEM教育以跨学科思维解决真实问题,注重反思迁移,为深度学习的实现提供可能。文章首先概述了STEM教育的特征,分析了STEM教育与深度学习的关系。接着,文章设计了深度学习的发生路线,并以此为基础确定了STEM教育的实施过程。随后,文章以STEM教育的实施过程为横坐标,以深度学习的发生路线为纵坐标,构建了指向深度学习的STEM教育模型。最后,文章以"抗震建筑的设计与制作"项目为例,从预热、酝酿、发生、成熟四个阶段阐释了指向深度学习的STEM教育模型的具体实施过程。文章的研究推动了深度学习与STEM教育的融合发展,可为课程教学改革提供有益参考。     

Creative teaching in STEM

If Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines in higher education are to retain students, there needs to be a shift towards teaching in more enriching and interesting ways. Creative teaching needs to become more prominent in STEM. This article presents a study that defines creative teaching in the STEM context and investigates attempts to teach creatively as experienced by nine STEM educators in an Australian university. The results highlighted that achieving creative teaching is difficult and that the element of surprise is essential. Despite the struggle required, creative teaching afforded fulfilment for teachers. We examine the characteristics of those interviewed and suggest strategies for fostering creative teaching. The findings extend beyond the STEM discipline.     

“I just do what the boys tell me”: Exploring small group student interactions in an integrated STEM unit

Gender equity issues remain a challenge in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, where women are highly underrepresented. As integrated STEM instruction becomes increasingly popular in elementary and middle school classrooms, it is important to consider whether the small group activities that are commonplace in STEM instruction support the equitable participation of young girls. This study builds on the existing body of literature to better understand how gender is related to student participation in small group STEM activities and whether students participate differently in science and engineering activities. A single embedded case study was used to explore the experiences of four students aged 10–11 years as they participated in small group work within an integrated STEM unit in their fifth-grade classroom. Two girls and two boys worked together throughout the unit to explore science content related to electromagnetism and apply their content knowledge to an engineering design challenge. Video and audio of students' small group interactions were analyzed using an observation protocol to code their participation in each 3-min segment of STEM activity. Student- and case-level analyses were used to identify patterns of interaction based on gender and type of activity (science vs. engineering). Findings suggest that boys and girls participate in small group STEM activities in different ways, adopting distinct roles within their group. In addition, students displayed divergent patterns of interaction in science- and engineering-focused lessons, suggesting that students need additional practice and support in navigating between science and engineering in integrated STEM units.     

The influence of teachers’ attitudes and school context on instructional practices in integrated STEM education

This paper uses structural equation modelling (SEM) to examine the influence of teachers' attitudes and school context on reported instructional practices in integrated STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Instead of using an overall measure for integrated STEM, five specific characteristics (integration, problem-centered, inquiry-based, design-based, and cooperative learning) are examined to get a more in-depth and nuanced insight into the factors influencing implementation. For each STEM characteristic, teachers’ attitudes are positively linked with instructional practices Moreover, different aspects of school context influence instructional practices either directly or indirectly. Opportunities for ameliorating the implementation of integrated STEM are discussed.