STEM Integration in K-12 Education Status, Prospects, and an Agenda for Research (2014) / Chapter Skim
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4 Implications of the Research for Designing Integrated STEM Experiences
4 Implications of the Research for Designing Integrated STEM Experiences
Pages 77-106
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From page 77... ...
In the first section, we explore research on how people learn in order to determine how integrated experiences in STEM might support learning, thinking, interest, and identity development, and, conversely, why they might do little to change students' attitudes, thinking, and behaviors. Drawing on these discussions together with the research findings and limitations reviewed in Chapter 3, we identify issues related to designing integrated STEM experiences so that they more effectively support learning within and across the STEM disciplines.
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From page 78... ...
This research provides a foundation for understanding how and why integrated STEM experiences can support improvement in learning and thinking, where they might pose difficulties for learners, and how they can be designed to be more effective. The committee considered findings from studies on learning and teaching across a range of research traditions including those informed by situative, sociocultural, cognitive, pragmatist, and constructivist theoretical perspectives.
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From page 79... ...
The importance of organized knowledge relates directly to some of the aims of STEM integration described in Chapter 3, such as helping students connect ideas learned at different stages of project-based learning or developing students' representational fluency. Thus one way to frame the goals of learning is to think of it as helping novices build and reorganize their knowledge to develop more expertlike competence in a domain.
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Integrated STEM educational experiences, by design, ask students to engage in the transfer of disciplinary knowledge and, ideally, enable the students to reliably transfer their knowledge to other areas and activities in the future. Transfer can be explored at a variety of levels -- from one context to another, one set of concepts to another, one school subject to another, one year of school to another, across school, and to everyday nonschool activities.
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From page 81... ...
Integrating Across Multiple Representations Representations that express or symbolize an idea or relationship are an important element of disciplinary knowledge and can facilitate learning. In STEM disciplines, each form of representation highlights or amplifies an aspect of a natural or designed system while simultaneously reducing or summarizing its essence (Latour 1999)
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From page 82... ...
Learning from Real-World Situations One hallmark of integrated approaches, though not unique to them, is the use of real-world situations or problems. They can bring STEM fields alive for students and deepen their learning, but they may also pose particular challenges for them.
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Although Kaminski and colleagues do not test claims about rich contexts directly (their "concrete" condition is an abstract image meant to resemble real objects) , this work does reveal some of the trade-offs for perceptually rich and lean curriculum materials when measuring learning and transfer.
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From page 84... ...
Design of integrated experiences must balance the richness of integration and real-world contexts against the constraints of the cognitive demands of processing information that is separated in time, in space, or across disciplines and types of representation. Learning by Doing and Embodied Cognition Integrated STEM experiences typically call on students to engage in activities that involve the use of tools or manipulation of objects, and claims have been made that this use enhances learning.
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. A related approach to understanding learning involves embodied cogni tion, the perspective that cognition occurs in a physical organism interacting with its environment; to understand the structures that mediate learning, one must consider the brain, body, and environment as an interactive unit.
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. Social Aspects of Learning and Cognition Social and cultural factors are fundamental to all learning experiences and particularly important in integrated experiences, which typically require students to work with each other and actively engage in discussion, joint decision making, and collaborative problem solving.
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Social guidance and support for learning also exist in cultural tools that aid thinking and problem solving and in the type and structure of the learning activities in which children engage. Certain social processes that support learning involve deliberate efforts to convey knowledge and strategies.
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. Summary Integrated approaches to STEM education are generally consistent with what is known about effective ways to support learning.
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Third, students need opportunities and supports for productive embodied cognitive and social interactions that support their learning. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DESIGN OF APPROACHES TO INTEGRATED STEM EDUCATION Research findings on integration converge with those on cognitive, social, and embodied learning processes to highlight the importance of designing integrated experiences that explicitly support students in building knowledge and skill both within and across disciplines.
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From page 90... ...
. The lack of explicit integration in STEM instruction is also problematic because studies show that students do not spontaneously integrate what they learn across representations and materials or across multi-day lessons, so integration cannot simply be assumed to take place simply because of temporal or spatial juxtaposition (Kozma 2003; Nathan et al., 2013; Walkington et al., in press)
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From page 91... ...
They need explicit support to elicit scientific or mathematical ideas in an engineering or technological design context, to connect those ideas productively, and to reorganize their ideas in ways that come to reflect normative, scientific ones. A number of integrated programs that use design as a context for learning science have incorporated scaffolding supports to help students connect normative science ideas to their designs (Fortus et al.
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From page 92... ...
The social components of the learning environment are interdependent, and learning depends on their coordination, but they have received little attention in research. Two key questions are: • What social processes will promote individual learning in integrated STEM education?
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From page 93... ...
In addition, the design should include explicit and specific learning outcomes for individuals in relation to the various aspects of the problem and clear means of assessing these gains, both within and outside the group. A distributed learning approach may also be useful for addressing learning issues related to equity and diversity in the classroom setting.
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. Research has also demonstrated the importance of the following design elements for integrated STEM education: • Interactions with others (Barron et al.
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From page 95... ...
For example, traditional approaches to science often favor aspects of a science identity that are more reflective of schooling than of science itself, thereby limiting engagement of some youth with strong science identities and rich knowledge based on nonschool experiences (Bricker and Bell 2012; Brickhouse 2001; Brickhouse et al. 2000; Brickhouse and Potter 2001)
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From page 96... ...
Looking across studies of science learning, there is evidence that classroom interventions and design experiments grounded in reform-based c urriculum/pedagogy and intended to explicitly incorporate students' identities in instruction can positively impact learning and identity. Calabrese Barton and Tan (2009)
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In sum, integrated STEM can provide opportunities for students to productively engage in STEM in ways that spark their interest and transform their identity. But the research base is sparse, particularly on the subject of designing integrated STEM experiences to intentionally support interest and identity.
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From page 98... ...
Integrated STEM experiences should be designed so that they support students' development of knowledge and practices in individual disciplines and their ability to recognize and make connections across disciplines. STEM curricula should also attend to discipline-specific learning progressions; if the learning goals of one discipline are primary, the knowledge and skills of other disciplines should be integrated into the curriculum with the learning progressions of that discipline in mind.
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Journal of the Learning Sciences 19:187–229. Calabrese Barton, A., and E
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Science Education 91:1–35. Dehaene, S., E
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Proceedings of the XXVIII Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp.
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2013. Cohesion as a mechanism of STEM integration.
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International Journal of Science Education 26(7)
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International Journal of Science Education 33(13)
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From page 105... ...
Bridges and barriers to constructing conceptual cohesion across modalities and tem poralities: Challenges of STEM integration in the precollege engineering classroom.
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