STEM Integration in K-12 Education Status, Prospects, and an Agenda for Research (2014) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 13-30
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From page 13... ...
. Multiple reports issued by influential education, policy, and business groups have argued the case for expanding and improving STEM education (e.g., AAAS 1990, 1993; Carnegie Corporation 2009; Council on Competitiveness 2005; NCMSTC 2000; NGA 2007; NRC 1996, 2007a, 2012a; NSB 2007; PCAST 2012)
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Knowledge from science informs the engineering design process. Technology, while not a discipline in the strictest sense, comprises the entire system of people and organizations, knowledge, processes, and devices that go into creating and operating technological artifacts, as well as the artifacts themselves.
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This report examines current initiatives in integrated STEM education and the evidence of their impacts. 1 It is worth noting that while the STEM acronym is gaining currency in policy and education circles, many Americans do not associate the term with education at all but with very different ideas, such as stem cell research and a part of a plant (Keefe 2009)
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For example, on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 4th-grade teachers reported the amount of instructional time in each subject. In reading, 49 percent of teachers reported providing more than 10 hours per week of language arts instruction, whereas only 29 percent of teachers reported spending more than 7 hours per week on mathematics instruction -- most (59 percent)
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In the past decade, however, much of vocational education has been adopting a more academic program of study, including material related to the STEM subjects, under the label of career and technical education, or CTE. Moreover, technology teachers today are a varied group.
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Over the years, such technologies have included filmstrips, movies, television, videos, and learning aids such as calculators and electronic white boards. Arguably, the most influential educational technologies to date are the personal computer and the Internet, including online resources and educational software.
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4 The committee uses "between" and "among" in recognition that some integrated STEM education initiatives involve connections between only two of the STEM disciplines, while others involve connections among three or more.
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• Think about themselves as science learners and develop an identity as someone who knows about, uses, and sometimes contributes to science. Advocates of more integrated approaches to teaching and learning, both within and across disciplines, note that the professional practices that inspired the focus on individual disciplines have been transformed in many workplace and research settings to emphasize multidisciplinary enterprises, such as biomedical engineering.
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They contend that teaching STEM in the context of realworld issues and challenges5 -- and hence, in an integrated fashion -- can make the subjects more relevant to students and teachers, thereby enhancing motivation for learning and improving student achievement and persistence. These effects, in turn, may enhance workplace and college readiness skills and increase the number of students who consider a career in a STEM-related field.
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Recognizing the need for a more robust evidence base, the National Academy of Engineering and the Board on Science Education of the National Research Council convened a committee to examine current efforts to connect the STEM disciplines in K–12 education through integrated approaches and to develop a research agenda that will provide the data needed to inform such efforts. Committee Charge The Committee on Integrated STEM Education was charged with developing a research agenda for determining the approaches and conditions most likely to lead to positive outcomes of integrated STEM education at the K–12 level.6 The specific objectives of the project were as follows: • Identify and characterize existing approaches to integrated STEM education, in both formal and after-school and informal7 settings.
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Defining integrated STEM education is further complicated by the fact that connections can be reflected at more than one level at the same time: in the student's thinking or behavior, in the teacher's instruction, in the curriculum, between and among teachers themselves, or in larger units of the education system, such as the organization of an entire school. The multidimensional nature of integrated STEM education led to one of the major tasks for the committee, "to identify and characterize existing approaches to integrated STEM." Chapter 2 of this report takes up this element of the charge.
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And while the committee was aware of a number of efforts to integrate one or more STEM subjects with others such as English language arts, art, and history, with few exceptions we restricted our analysis to integration involving only the STEM subjects. Finally, this report raises many more questions than it answers regarding integrated STEM education, as is appropriate for a topic that has received relatively little systematic attention in the research literature.
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; DHA also oversaw a review of the cognitive sciences literature related to integrated STEM education. The literature review began with a search using the major multidisciplinary search engines such as Scopus, Web of Science, and INSPEC and was designed to capture a broad range of studies.
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. Finally, the committee's understanding of integrated STEM education and how to make this report useful to readers was informed by interviews
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Chapter 4 explores a broader range of literatures and identifies potential implications for the design of integrated STEM learning experiences. Both chapters draw on the DHA literature review and commissioned papers as well as the committee's expertise.
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. 9 David Heil and Associates, the contractor that oversaw the literature reviews and con ducted the programs reviews for this project, helped develop and conducted a formative evaluation of the Family Engineering program.
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2010. Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.
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Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education System. Available at www.nsf.gov/nsb/documents/2007/stem_action.pdf (retrieved August 14, 2013)
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