The aim of this study is to examine how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is implemented in the published literature. To accomplish this, the educational experiences published in indexed magazines in the main Web of Science collection during the 2013-2018 period were examined, with special attention paid to (a) The STEM concepts defined in the theoretical frameworks; (b) the STEM disciplines that intervene; (c) the possible benefits of STEM education; and (d) the key aspects for the success of the educational intervention. The results indicate that the theoretical frameworks used normally focus more on the variables that are the object of the study than on STEM education, and that there are multiple interpretations of what STEM education is, and these interpretations do usually involve the integrated appearance of the four disciplines that make up the acronym.

STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is an educational approach that is now accompanied by the STEAM (STEM + Arts) variant. Both educational approaches seek to renew the scientific literacy of younger generations, and, with the inclusion of the arts, student creativity is described as a key skill that must receive special attention. A review is therefore presented here of empirical STEM and STEAM-based educational interventions so as to determine their potential to develop student creativity. A systematic search of papers over one decade, 2010–2020, found 14 didactic interventions on the Web of Science and Scopus databases for analysis within the review process. The analysis suggested that: (1) the interventions based both on STEM and STEAM have multiple and even contradictory forms, both in theory and in practice; (2) there appears to be a preference among researchers for the Likert-type test to evaluate creativity; and (3) both educational approaches show evidence of positive effects on student creativity. In the light of the principal findings, it was concluded that arguing for the implementation of STEAM education over STEM education, with a view to developing or promoting student creativity, is not in agreement with the evidence from the empirical studies.

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We believe that one of the most effective ways of increasing the quality of conceptual schemas in practice is by using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that enforces all relevant quality criteria. With this view, in this paper we analyze the support provided by current IDEs in the enforcement of quality criteria and we compare it with the one that could be provided given the current state of the art. We show that there is a large room for improvement. We introduce the idea of a unified catalog that would include all known quality criteria. We present an initial version of this catalog. We then evaluate the effectiveness of the additional support that could be provided by the current IDEs if they enforced all the quality criteria defined in the catalog. We focus on conceptual schemas written in UML/OCL, although our approach could be applied to other languages.