Vietnamese pre-service teachers and in-service teachers’ conception of STEM Education

Abstract

Recently, STEM education has emphasized in many countries including Vietnam because of its’ benefits. To prepare for effective STEM education instruction, the role of education universities in training pre-service teachers is concerned. To support training of STEM teaching instruction in classrooms for pre-service teachers, it is necessary to know their conceptualization of STEM conception and differences of their views with in-service teachers’ conceptions so that pre-service teachers work more effectively in their internship and near future in schools. However, little has been reported on how pre-service teachers are conceptualizing STEM education, and differences between pre-service teachers and in-service teachers’ STEM education conception who have more experiences in real classrooms in Mekong, Delta, Vietnam. In this study, to explore their STEM conception, an open-ended survey collecting both textual and visual responses was given to 100 in-service teachers from 10 schools in Can Tho city and 185 pre-service teachers of the Physics teacher education program, Can Tho University, Vietnam. The findings showed that both in-service teachers and pre-service teachers keep various ideas about STEM conception. They have both similarities and differences in conceptualization.