Prospective teachers' design of STEAM learning units: STEAM capabilities' analysis

Abstract

STEM education is a new field within which understandings of what constitutes effective practice, and how this can be supported, are still in their infancy. The present research describes the experiences of prospective elementary school teachers in designing collaboratively STEM activities. This designing experiences occurred in a context of a PD program called "Introduction to STEM education". During the STEM PD program, the pre-service teachers worked in six groups. Each group included three pre-service teachers who worked together throughout the PD program. Three written STEM units of three groups were chosen to be analyzed. In analyzing the STEM units, we referred to the STEM capabilities which consists of three components: STEM knowledge, skills and ways of thinking. The findings show different possibilities that STEM education can afford for task design. In terms of the integration of disciplines, the three analyzed units included activities in which, mostly, at least two disciplines were dominant. In terms of STEM skills, the designed unites targeted mainly the individual learning STEM skill instead of collaborative skills, which emphasize the need to pay special emphasis to this issue. Finally, in terms of STEM ways of thinking, analytical and evidence-based ways of thinking prevailed in the three units. The previous findings point at the importance of support for pre-service teachers to design STEM activities for implementation in their classrooms.

Applying the 6E learning by design model to support student teachers to integrate artificial intelligence applications in their classroom

“…These findings are similar to those from previous studies (Lee & Perret, 2022;Anabousy & Daher, 2022) in that they all report LbD as helpful in training teachers to integrate technology in the classrooms. However, unlike the previous studies, the present studies focused on the 6E LbD model for supporting teachers to integrate AI in the classrooms.…”

“…They report that teachers highly rated the project as valuable to their learning. Also, Anabousy and Daher (2022) observed an improvement in skills for designing STEM learning units among preservice teachers who were involved in LbD training in Israel. In addition, Haas et al (2021) reported that hands-on activities helped pre-service teachers develop skills for facilitating Outdoor STEAM activities in the classroom.…”

From stereotype to reality: A pilot study on the use of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and STEAM in design education in Taiwan

“…(3) interdisciplinarity, their goals and values remain unchanged. This coincides with the philosophy of STEAM (Haider, 1990;Marshall, 2014;Liao, 2016;MacDonald et al, 2019;Malele and Ramaboka, 2020;Anabousy and Daher, 2022).…”

“…Recently, the academic community has been interested in the concept, scope, and core theory of STEM and STEAM, and these successive publications provide strong theoretical support (Babaci-Wilhite, 2018;Culén and Gasparini, 2018;Milner-Bolotin, 2018;Khine and Areepattamannil, 2019;Videla et al, 2021;Anabousy and Daher, 2022). We live in a designed world.…”

Establishing a PBL STEM Framework for Pre-Service Teachers

“…Much of the current research has highlighted the ability of in-service educators to integrate PBL and STEM [12,17]; however, research into pre-service teachers' (PSTs') ability to develop meaningful interdisciplinary, project-based STEM curricula is lacking. Research also suggests that teacher education programs fail to train PSTs for diverse classrooms or prepare them to integrate global awareness through social justice issues [25,35]. A gap exists between theory and classroom approaches related to integrating social justice theory with STEM practices [36].…”