Context of STEM Integration in Schools: Views from In-service Science Teachers

Abstract

This study explores science teachers' views regarding Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) pedagogy and its interdisciplinary nature. It also seeks to identify teachers' views on the contextual factors that facilitate and hinder such pedagogy in their schools. Qualitative methodologies were used through focus group discussions and an interview protocol. From the specific contextual issues that were highlighted in the findings, was teacher self-efficacy, pedagogical-knowledge, issues related to establishing a collaborative school culture and familiarity to STEM education among school administrators, students and parents. Findings expressed teachers' concerns of their underpreparedness to enact STEM practices and illustrated that engineering is the least mentioned discipline to be integrated with science. The study ends with recommendations that could lead to develop a professional development model to enact STEM education in schools based on valuing partnership with universities and industries as a necessary step for enacting a STEM integrated model.

Teachers’ perception of STEM integration and education: a systematic literature review

“…The same teachers felt collaboration and technology would be important to transdisciplinary teaching. The concept of interdisciplinarity was difficult for some secondary teachers to grasp, with a perception that integration between two subjects was possible but putting the four STEM disciplines together was problematic (El-Deghaidy et al 2017). El-Deghaidy et al (2017) also found the teachers did not have a clear understanding of how to integrate technology, believing it was just hardware.…”

“…Teachers value these authentic learning experiences, without one right answer (Bruce-Davis et al 2014). They felt students needed lots of practice participating in group work and learning through doing in order to be successful with STEM learning (El-Deghaidy et al 2017;Herro and Quigley 2017). Several teachers were happily surprised that low-performing students were able to be successful in the less-structured and more challenging STEM problems (Lesseig et al 2016;Wang et al 2011).…”

“…This will affect how they teach STEM curriculum. Teachers have reported challenges associated with learning the content while teaching multiple courses together (El-Deghaidy et al 2017;Goodpaster et al 2012;Herro and Quigley 2017). Teachers felt developing new STEM problems while integrating different domains was difficult.…”

“…In other words, they felt STEM is important. Teachers believed STEM leads to higher expectations for students after high school and felt increases in scientific literacy were valuable as they challenge students to think critically about current issues and future implications in their own lives (Bruce-Davis et al 2014;El-Deghaidy et al 2017;Herro and Quigley 2017). These K-12 elementary and secondary teachers (n = 729) believed STEM education has a positive impact on student learning and outcomes (Park et al 2016).…”

“…A dynamic teacher with a positive attitude toward STEM seems to be the single most important factor to implementation fidelity and STEM program success (McMullin and Reeve 2014). These teachers believe STEM integration can improve their students' learning outcomes (Bagiati and Evangelou 2015;Dare et al 2014;El-Deghaidy et al 2017;Wang et al 2011).…”