STEM
It was only when Friedman saw the establishment of a degree in STEM education at Virginia Tech University in 2005 that the movement started gaining traction, and it was something that implied gradual expansion of worldwide until it went global.
This was in response to the social requirements outlined by the US National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, which noted that the STEM ability of US students was underdeveloped compared to other nations, and the National Governor’s Association, which noted that one needed to establish a identity to remain economically competitive. Thereafter, it was applied to the education sector, which is a fundamental instrument for bridging the increasing need for human capital and, by extension, proving that the provision of best quality STEM education is inevitable in today’s times.
STEM literacy and identity
The development of the movement compelled the Washington STEM Study Group to develop and articulate the term literacy as the ability to recognize and utilize material from discipline areas to interpret and solve troublesome situations not resolvable by a mono‐disciplinary approach. For this new literacy to develop, every discipline in must have a sequence of basic conceptual, procedural, and attitudinal contents that it integrates so that while command of each of these disciplines is required, so is the ability to understand and appreciate the relationships between them.
This fusion of knowledge domains includes receiving an end product that is more than the sum of its components. Therefore, the Washington Study Group submits that a student will be literate when he or she realizes an understanding of how the world operates using these four fields and can use this understanding in enhancing social, economic, certification, stem education, environmental conditions in all areas of society.
Zollman goes on with the development of this educational method, and to achieve that, presents a definition of literacy aimed at the educational arena and directed toward problem‐based learning. Based on this writer, literacy involves the capacity to learn and use knowledge from the disciplines to tackle authentic problems, with specific emphasis placed on having to acquire a set of particular affective and procedural STEM skills to solidify this literacy.
STEM teaching and learning
STEM learning is poorly defined in the literature, thus, we are bound to articulate one from varied understandings of learning. Dreyfus, Jungwirth, Eliovitch and Houseal, Abd‐El‐Khalick, and Destefano outline that to have successful learning occur, we should pay proper heed to conceptualize and utilizing ideas on the part of learners. Drake, Land, Tyminski, and Rahm confirm that any learning has to be based on the development of knowledge and skills through students’ experience.
From these conceptualizations, and from those already provided literacy and education, we have defined learning as the blending of several conceptual, STEM education, STEM learning, procedural, attitudinal contents through a set of skills for ideas’ application or solution of interdisciplinary problems in real-world contexts.
To realize this learning, instruction has to be founded on the standards of curricula, generating experiences for students through which they are able to attain proficiency. These experiences must include research, critical thinking, and problem-solving. Again, we are confronted by the issue of lacking a conceptualization of what STEM learning means.
METHOD
We conducted a qualitative and purposeful analysis of the articles released during the period in the database of the core Web of Science collection of Clarivate Analytics. Next, we created a search key utilizing the terms STEM education, STEM literacy, STEM learning, STEM teaching, STEM competence, which are connected using the Boolean OR operator, narrowing the search through the AND Boolean operator and the category of Education and Educational Research, limiting it to the timeframe.
We also set the inclusion criteria below: works of the type magazine article the magazines on which they appear should have an impact index in Journal Citation Reports articles that include keywords, and studies that report a education intervention conceived in any education setting where preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school, or university students are involved.
The articles’ quality was ensured according to the criteria that magazines included in WOS with a JCR impact index should meet. As far as the review protocol is concerned, this was constructed from the research questions proposed; in this manner, we established the various units of analysis and procedures to use for gathering the data from the selected works. This protocol can be referenced in Appendix A. In addition, the descriptors utilized to determine the STEM fields are presented in Appendix B.
Data coding and analysis
Data coding, which entailed the implementation of the protocol that was created, was conducted by the authors collaboratively to enhance the understanding of the works and gather the data according to mutual decisions. Therefore, the coded and analyzed aspects of each work were the following Characteristics of the study, considering the year of publication, research design, educational level of students who took part in the intervention, theoretical underpinning of the study, identification of the fields and contents addressed in the intervention narrated, discussion and conclusions of each work, to identify the advantages and main points for STEM education.
Only that information shown explicitly in the written documents was coded, it was only labeled as nonspecific in the instance of the coding and analysis of the fields were inferences made by the authors, and always from the data outlined in the articles under analysis, in a manner in which in the instances where fields were not labeled, care was taken to specify underlying branches of knowledge or, in their absence, the outlining of contents, procedures, and skills particular to each field. In addition, in those situations where information expressly described was not found, one knew that merely those best STEM courses mentioned were done.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we present a set of implications that may prove helpful for developing, executing, and demonstrating the outcomes of a STEM oriented instruction intervention.
On one hand, concerning the design of the oriented educational intervention, the conceptual basis of a study that addresses education must define those terms treated therein with particular concern for the specificity of the adopted viewpoint. Also, logically, theoretically informed, and in consideration of the most customary practices, it seems preferable to take an approach towards education where education in the four disciplines that constitute it is part of a unified educational experience.
Furthermore, there is a need to make the correlation of the content learned expressly with a good degree of detail together with their connection to the various fields to contribute to understanding the educational intervention provided. Finally, engineering could be a discipline with a high integrating value, which would contribute to reducing the difficulties that might arise from the design of a STEM focused educational intervention.
Conversely, regarding the findings that were achieved, the advantages of education, with particular emphasis on the level of integration of the fields, need to be made clear in the article to make the process in the description of the strengths and weaknesses of the various levels of integration. In addition, those elements that were most important for the successful implementation of the intervention need to be emphasized in the report to support the design of future STEM learning experiences.