Search Results (134)

This research is focused on exploring the importance of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education in the development of critical competencies among secondary school students in the 21st century. This was aimed to assess the impact of STEM-based activities on students’ creative and computational thinking skills. A quasi-experimental design that included 77 secondary school students from public and private schools in Bandar Lampung, Indonesia, who participated in STEM interventions for over 5 weeks, was adopted. Data were collected through creative thinking tests and questionnaires on CT and STEM attitudes. The results showed that students who participated in STEM activities exhibited significantly higher creative thinking scores compared to peers taught with the traditional curriculum. Specifically, the experimental group showed a progressive increase in weekly test scores, suggesting that STEM methods improved students’ performance over time. Structural equation modeling (SEM) disclosed strong positive associations between attitudes towards STEM, CT, and creativity. The implications of these results outlined the need to integrate STEM education into curricula to foster essential skills for future challenges. This research contributes to the understanding of effective educational strategies and also advocates for a shift towards more interactive and integrative methods in secondary education to meet the demands of the contemporary workforce. Full article

This article presents a comparison of two qualitative case studies. The first case study is a partnership group involving two urban secondary school teachers working with one engineer and one education faculty member where they implemented several science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) lessons over the course of an academic year. The second case study is a partnership group involving undergraduate college students working together to build a data collection device attached to a high-altitude balloon to answer a scientific question or solve an engineering problem and translate the project into engaging lessons for a K-12/secondary student audience. The studies employed a socio-cultural theoretical framework as the lens to examine the individuals’ perspectives, experiences, and engineering meaning-making processes, and to consider what these meant to the partnership itself. The methods included interviews, focus groups, field notes, and artifacts. The analysis involved multi-level coding. The findings indicated that the strength of the partnership (pre, little p, or big P) among participants influenced the strength of the secondary engineering lessons. The partnership growth implications in terms of K-12/secondary and collegiate engineering education included the engineering lesson strength, partnership, and engineering project sustainability The participant partnership meanings revolved around lesson creation, incorporating engineering ideas into the classroom, increasing communication, and increasing secondary students’ learning, while tensions arose from navigating (not quite negotiating) roles as a team. A call for attention to school–university partnerships and the voices heard in engineering partnership building are included since professional skills are becoming even more important due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies. Full article

Numerous studies, diagnoses, and projects have been carried out in recent years to analyze the low female presence in STEM studies. However, progress has been limited, and the female presence is still low in certain degrees related to information and communication technologies, physics, and engineering. Many of the actions have been aimed at attracting women to these fields, but few have tried to change the culture of these disciplines, which make them a non-place for women. This paper analyses the measures carried out in Spanish public universities, and specifically at the University of Santiago de Compostela, to contribute to making these disciplines a place for women. Computer engineering workshops for primary and secondary education are proposed, incorporating a gender perspective. These transformative activities were highly valuated and welcomed by non-university teachers. The ideas inspiring these initiatives might help both to attract girls to STEM degrees and to generate gender equality environments, in order to change the androcentric culture of this field. Full article

Participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is crucial, as these fields present an opportunity for individuals to overcome socio-economic adversities such as unemployment and poverty. In South Africa, access to STEM education has improved in recent years, partly due to the availability of study grants for learners interested in these fields. However, evidence shows that women remain underrepresented in STEM fields. Gender stereotypes, bullying, and pay disparities are cited as some of the contributing factors. Despite these overwhelming challenges, female learners are increasingly pursuing STEM education. Guided by the resilience theory, we explored the factors motivating female learners to enroll in STEM fields at a public secondary school level in South Africa. The research adopted the snowball sampling technique to recruit learners attending a public secondary school in South Africa. Due to COVID-19-related restrictions in 2022, the research data was collected through telephonic one-on-one interviews. The findings revealed that access to competitive employment opportunities, impactful careers, personal growth, and financial independence were some factors sparking the female learners’ interest in STEM. However, the learners experienced gender stereotypes and discrimination, which made them doubt their abilities to thrive in STEM education/fields. To cope with the complexities of STEM, the learners relied on their caregivers for emotional support, and they attended extra lessons and tutorials offered by the education system. The findings highlight the need for the government to prioritize support programs for female learners who must continuously fight rejection in STEM fields. Full article

International and Canadian policy recommendations underscore the urgent need for more STEM graduates and systemic educational reform, particularly in fostering global competencies. This study examines the collaborative development of an innovative high school STEM program aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, focusing specifically on family involvement. We ask, “How are families contributing to the co-design and revision of an innovative STEM program in a southern Ontario secondary school”? Grounded in human-centered design and developmental evaluation (DE), the study uses a mixed-methods annual survey administered to parents from 2021 to 2024. A total of 143 parents shared their perspectives on the program’s strengths, challenges, student engagement, global competency development, and future readiness. Findings reveal that families played a key role in shaping a student-led, project-based STEM program grounded in real-world issues. While parents expressed overall satisfaction, they also identified challenges such as limited collaboration, communication gaps, insufficient community engagement, and concerns about academic rigor. Recommendations include enhanced communication strategies, a dedicated site coordinator, more classroom support, and ongoing curriculum review. The paper highlights the value of a design lab approach in deepening parent engagement and continuously evolving STEM education in response to community needs. Full article

(1) Background: The under-representation of women in STEM fields, particularly in areas such as physics and computing, is far from being resolved. This gender gap has complex causes. This research was carried out to understanding how physics teachers in Portugal are aware of the existence of a gender gap and how they use or are willing to use girl-friendly strategies in their lessons; (2) Methods: A sample of 55 Portuguese physics and chemistry teachers from the third cycle of basic education and secondary education and an 8-item survey were used. (3) Results: The results show that most teachers perceive girls’ participation in physics as satisfactory, and that girls do not perceive a gender gap and are interested in the subject, but may not be aware of the concept and application of girl-friendly strategies. (4) Conclusions: No correlation was found between gender or years of service and interest in the topic of girl-friendly strategies. Further research with a more diverse sample is needed to generalize these findings. Full article

It is well established that women’s representation in scientific and technical fields decreases with societal affluence, but the mechanisms underlying this so-called paradox remain contested. This study leverages distinctive features of the Israeli educational system to identify social psychological and organizational mechanisms driving contextual variability in the gendering of physics and computing subjects. Using in-depth interviews and original surveys, we compare gender gaps in ninth graders’ attitudes and aspirations across two highly segregated yet centrally administered state school sectors: one serving the socioeconomically marginalized Arab Palestinian minority, and one serving the Jewish secular majority. Results reveal curricular affinities, discourses, and course-taking patterns that are differentially gendered across school sectors. While boys and girls in Arab Palestinian schools report more instrumentalist motivations and more positive attitudes toward mathematically intensive fields, students in Jewish schools engage in highly gendered, self-reflexive discourses that support gendered course-taking. Findings support arguments positing gender-specific effects of postmaterialist, individualistic value systems, and suggest that the cultural and organizational processes that generate larger gender gaps in more affluent countries may also play out within countries. Full article

STEAM education has become a global agenda to integrate humanities subjects with STEM elements. With a lack of science-related teacher training, promoting STEM education under humanities curriculums faces challenges. However, limited research has been conducted to understand the concerns of humanities teachers in applying STEM education in their classrooms. In this study, we examined the concerns of pre-service and in-service geography (GEOG) teachers (N = 49) in Hong Kong (HK) secondary schools and evaluated the effectiveness of trainer workshops in alleviating their concerns. We applied an in-depth questionnaire analysis based on a 5-point Likert scale under a “Stages of Concern” model. The ordinal regression and t-test results suggested that (1) the pre-service and in-service GEOG teachers were highly concerned in most of the stages of concerns (Mean = 4.06/5); (2) unique yet different concerns about GEOG STEM education were identified from the pre-service teachers and in-service teachers; (3) teacher training workshops that offer scientific and STEM training could be effective in addressing the concerns of in-service teachers. As such, this study supports the development of geography STEM education and promotes the education community’s ability to address teachers’ concerns in embracing STEM education. Full article

For many Native American students, the thirty-seven existing tribal colleges improve their access to post-secondary education, especially for those living in reservation communities and surrounding rural areas. They also support tribal nations’ goals of offering accredited degree programs, as well honoring Indigenous knowledge. This is important for students enrolled in STEM courses since Native Americans are under-represented in these fields. In the early 2000s, Chief Dull Knife College (CDKC), the tribal college of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, was supported by National Science Foundation funding in developing a new math program to meet the unique cultural and instructional needs of its students. In this case study of a culturally responsive math program, we hypothesize that students participating in the new developmental math program attempt and earn more credits compared to cohorts participating in previous math programs and take less time on average to reach college-level math. We present information on the math outcomes of the participants in two variations of the math program reforms that have addressed the obstacles to student retention and achievement. The panel data available include students’ demographic characteristics, placement test scores, and math course grades and the credits for all students enrolled from 2006 to 2019. While the number of credits attempted or earned did not differ statistically across the cohorts, the qualitative data further show that the students appreciate the culturally responsive aspects of the program. Ultimately, we have found that these aspects resulted in increased confidence of the students in their academic skills, stronger Native identities and engagement as students, as well as an improved sense of belonging in this higher education environment, all of which were important goals of the developmental math program. Full article

Gender disparity in scientific fields, identified with the acronym STEM, is a complex issue whose multiple causes have distant origins in time. In the early development of scientific disciplines, women were often denied access to education and professional opportunities, and their contributions to the scientific fields were frequently not recognized. These trends of underrepresentation gave rise to the male-dominated culture in STEM that persists today, as young women often lack female role models and are less likely to pursue careers in STEM, perpetuating the gender gap and limiting women’s influence and visibility in these fields. Here we present the protocol of the WHEN project, which aims to explore the perceptions that high-school students have of scientific careers and of the women in science, investigating whether gender stereotypes persist and can affect decisions about future paths. Through questionnaires, this study investigates the impact of socio-economic variables on the persistence of gender stereotypes and, most importantly, explores the potential for reducing them through direct engagement with female STEM role models. Full article

This paper presents the design of an integrated STEM education teaching–learning sequence (TLS) for secondary education and the adaptation of this design for the training of future science teachers, as well as the implementation and evaluation during the academic years 2022/2023 and 2023/2024 in the master’s degree in secondary teacher training. This is an integrated STEM education project that seeks to design the prototype of an autonomous car using the mBot robot as a base. Thus, it allows for the integration of physics kinematics with robotics programming guided by an engineering design. This study was carried out with 43 pre-service teachers, and the impact on both content and procedural knowledge and attitudes was analyzed. The results show an increase in knowledge; reflect the usefulness of the tools used to work on design, evaluation, and optimization procedures; and, finally, a change in the students’ emotions towards a more positive perception of the disciplines involved and the subject to be dealt with in the project. Full article

As mathematics is the foundation for pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors, investigating the assessment of attitudes toward mathematics is essential for promoting the development of the STEM field. However, the work focusing on developing a survey of attitudes toward mathematics is limited in mainland China. This study built a theoretical construct of students’ attitudes toward mathematics based on the characteristics of the educational system in mainland China. A survey researchers could use to measure mainland Chinese students’ attitudes toward mathematics was created and developed according to the proposed theoretical construct. The target survey was validated using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) based on 700 and 778 high school students from mainland China, respectively. Furthermore, the relationship between math attitudes and performance was used to check the construct of the developed survey. The finalized survey includes four scales: confidence (i.e., α = 0.90 with 10 items), anxiety (i.e., α = 0.90 with 10 items), value (i.e., α = 0.70 with 6 items), and enjoyment (i.e., α = 0.71 with 8 items). The overall results show that the survey is reliable and valid to measure secondary students’ attitudes toward mathematics, and thus suggest future studies about measuring Chinese secondary students’ attitudes towards mathematics by employing this survey. This study might draw the attention of researchers to investigate attitudes toward mathematics while exploring their affective and cognitive outcomes related to mathematics. Full article

There is an ongoing need to evaluate whether commonly used educational software effectively supports inquiry-based learning and computational thinking skills development, which are key objectives in secondary STEM curricula. This research establishes criteria for characterising digital technologies, such as modelling and simulation software, virtual laboratories, and microcosms, to ensure their suitability in supporting students’ computational thinking through inquiry-based activities in STEM courses. The main criteria focus on six key areas: (a) production of meaning, (b) support in problem formulation, (c) ability to manage processes easily, (d) support in expressing solutions, (e) support in executing and evaluating solutions, and (f) ability to articulate and reflect on processes and solutions. Using this evaluation framework, two widely used software tools, Tracker 6.1.3 and GeoGebra 5, commonly employed in high school physics and mathematics, were assessed. The trial evaluation results are discussed, with recommendations for improving the software to support these educational objectives. Full article

This paper presents a pedagogical intervention targeted at secondary school students developed by two researchers in physics. The project seeks to narrow the gender gap in STEM fields by fostering students’ critical awareness of gender stereotypes and roles, helping them to recognize the influence that gender has on their educational choices and professional aspirations. Unlike other orientation programs, here STEM subjects are not the explicit content, rather the working methodology. Our intervention adopts a project-based learning approach introduced by a board game designed to engage students in the topic. Students are guided in carrying out an autonomous investigation of gender discrepancies within their family, school, and peer contexts through a scientific approach, by administering surveys, gathering and analyzing data, and using gender indicators. The final objective is developing a Gender Report of the school. After presenting the project, we document the project experience in nine schools of the Naples (Italy) area through a qualitative analysis of students’ Reports, focusing on the gender dynamics they have identified, as well as the facilitators’ observations. Our analysis shows that traditional gender roles and stereotypes persist, yet first-hand observation may stimulate students’ critical thinking skills from a gender perspective. Full article

Integrated STEM (i-STEM) education is attracting attention from educators and researchers worldwide to improve student achievement and engagement in STEM subjects and encourage the take-up of STEM-related careers. Multiple models of STEM integration have been proposed, and how i-STEM is interpreted and enacted in school contexts appears to vary considerably. This article reports the perceptions and practices of a group of Australian secondary school teachers with a commitment to implementing i-STEM in their schools but who have not received any specific professional development in this domain. Through individual, qualitative interviews, the study revealed considerable variation in how the teachers interpreted and enacted i-STEM in their schools. Teachers tended to develop learning activities that prioritized the subject area of their particular expertise and that had only tenuous links to mathematics. They considered i-STEM more engaging for their students than traditional subjects but were constrained in their planning by their various school regimes concerning assessment, curricula, and timetables. These structural and systemic impediments represent a core challenge for STEM teachers and teaching as greater numbers of schools and teachers in Australia are expected to implement some form of i-STEM education. Insights from this study point to the importance of developing support structures that allow for variations in context, as well as teacher interest and experience, yet that embrace a coherent and cohesive view of i-STEM, in the absence of a formal STEM curriculum and available professional development opportunities. Full article