Abstract
BackgroundFor schools to include quality STEM education, it is important to understand teachers’ beliefs and perceptions related to STEM talent development. Teachers, as important persons within a student’s talent development, hold prior views and experiences that will influence their STEM instruction. This study attempts to understand what is known about teachers’ perceptions of STEM education by examining existing literature.ResultsStudy inclusion criteria consisted of empirical articles, which aligned with research questions, published in a scholarly journal between 2000 and 2016 in English. Participants included in primary studies were preK-12 teachers. After quality assessment, 25 articles were included in the analysis. Thematic analysis was used to find themes within the data. Findings indicate that while teachers value STEM education, they reported barriers such as pedagogical challenges, curriculum challenges, structural challenges, concerns about students, concerns about assessments, and lack of teacher support. Teachers felt supports that would improve their effort to implement STEM education included collaboration with peers, quality curriculum, district support, prior experiences, and effective professional development.ConclusionsRecommendations for practice include quality in-service instruction over STEM pedagogy best practices and district support of collaboration time with peer teachers. Recommendations for future research are given.
Highlights
In order to address the need for more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) literate workers, both elementary and secondary classrooms are integrating STEM curriculum and pedagogy into their school day
How does existing research characterize teachers’ perceptions of utilizing STEM pedagogy? Existing research gives us some insight into the beliefs teachers hold about STEM education
Several themes emerged to summarize existing research related to the following codes: teacher variables, application activities, cross-curricular integration, student enjoyment, student struggles, and value of STEM
Summary
Educators have to understand the value and power of the engineering design process to enable students to fail and persevere. These teachers have to know not just their subject matter, but the content of the other disciplines. They must feel capable of creating an educational environment that allows students to solve ill-defined problems while deepening their content knowledge. For schools to include quality STEM education, it is important to understand teachers’ beliefs and perceptions related to STEM talent development. As important persons within a student’s talent development, hold prior views and experiences that will influence their STEM instruction. This study attempts to understand what is known about teachers’ perceptions of STEM education by examining existing literature
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