School STEM Research Articles

Unlocking students’ creative potential in designing technological-enriched design solutions

Creativity is an important competency for talents in the twenty first century. The study examines how integrating real-world community service challenges into the secondary school STEM curriculum impacts students’ creativity and STEM content knowledge. A total of 123 secondary school students learned the challenges faced by people with visual impairments and applied their STEM knowledge to design creative solutions. Students proposed diversified solutions, which were of three themes: safety, recreation, and convenience. The quality of the solutions indicated that the higher-performing groups outperformed the medium-performing and lower-performing groups in originality. The lower-performing groups needed further support on all dimensions, especially technical knowledge and skills, which measures proficiency in using integrated knowledge to realize designs.

The Effectiveness of Teaching Mechanics Using Practical Experiments in Developing Strategic Competence and Design Thinking for STEM School Students

The Effectiveness of Teaching Mechanics Using Practical Experiments in Developing Strategic Competence and Design Thinking for STEM School Students

Validity and reliability of concept inventory test in human physiology

Biology education plays a vital role in nurturing the understanding of learners about the intricacy of life. Various efforts have emerged to strengthen learning biological concepts but there were still studies that showed that learners have low mastery in some aspects. To determine how well students understood various biological topics, including human physiology, Concept inventory tests (CIT) were used. The concept inventory test may be able to spot students' misconceptions and ultimately lead to improved comprehension. The crafted CIT developed with the aid of a table of specifications based on Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive domain was assessed according to its validity and reliability. In validation, content validity and item analysis were considered while reliability test was employed through Cronbach’s alpha. Distractor analysis was also performed to determine possible source of misconception per item. The CIT was administered to 120 senior high school STEM students (50.8% from the private schools, 37.5% in regular public schools and 11.7% from public schools with special programs in science). The results displayed high content validity with a mean of 4.83 for content validity and an average Aiken’s validity coefficient of 0.98. It also highlighted that the test is moderately difficult with the test difficulty of 0.58, as well as, discriminatory with a discriminating level of 0.46. After item classification, 63 items were retained (39 accepted, 24 for revisions) and Chronbach’s alpha (α=0.74) indicated good internal consistency. The concept inventory test propounds to be a good classroom test with minor items to be revised.

Co-designing AI Education Curriculum with Cross-Disciplinary High School Teachers

High school teachers from many disciplines have growing interests in teaching about artificial intelligence (AI). This cross-disciplinary interest reflects the prevalence of AI tools across society, such as Generative AI tools built upon Large Language Models (LLM). However, high school classes are unique and complex environments, led by teachers with limited time and resources with priorities that vary by class and the students they serve. Therefore, developing curricula about AI for classes that span many disciplines (e.g. history, art, math) must involve centering the expertise of cross-disciplinary teachers. In this study, we conducted five collaborative curricular co-design sessions with eight teachers who taught high school humanities and STEM classes. We sought to understand how teachers considered AI when it was taught in art, math, and social studies contexts, as well as opportunities and challenges they identified with incorporating AI tools into their instruction. We found that teachers considered technical skills and ethical debates around AI, opportunities for "dual exploration" between AI and disciplinary learning, and limitations of AI tools as supporting engagement and reflection but also potentially distracting. We interpreted our findings relative to co-designing adaptable AI curricula to support teaching about and with AI across high school disciplines.

Exploring the influence of non-cognitive skills on academic achievement in STEM education: the case of Kazakhstan

IntroductionThis exploratory study delves into the relationships between non-cognitive skills and academic achievement within the unique context of STEM schools in Kazakhstan.MethodsSurvey data were collected from 109 teachers and 395 students at a STEM secondary school in Kazakhstan. Correlational, regression and path analyses were conducted to explore the relationship between non-cognitive skills and academic performance in Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, and Chemistry classes.ResultsThe results showed that out of the 26 skills, eight had a direct impact, 12 had an indirect impact, and six had no impact on academic achievement of students in the four STEM subjects.DiscussionThis study is the first to explicitly examine the impact of one group of non-cognitive skills on academic achievement of students in STEM subjects mediated by another group of these skills. Teachers are encouraged to integrate non-cognitive skill development into curricula, tailored to subject-specific needs. Policymakers can use findings to inform equitable skill development policies.

Investigating the role of self-selected STEM projects in fostering student autonomy and self-directed learning

Research in STEM education has focussed on integrated STEM projects that combine knowledge and skills across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. These integrated STEM projects are typically designed by teachers or researchers addressing a limited range of topics that do not always cater well to the diversity of interest among children and adolescents. By contrast, self-selected projects where students have more choices and autonomy in selecting their own projects are relatively rare. Consequently, there is a gap in the literature on students’ learning experiences when they choose and develop their own STEM projects. This study aims to examine the classroom experience and enactment of a high school STEM course designed for Grade 9 and 10 students (14 to 16 years old) to carry out a project of their choice aligned with the theme of sustainability. A case study methodology was used to investigate eight students’ lived experiences in making connections to STEM. The study reveals the nature of students’ self-directed learning experiences as they chose their own topics of exploration and subsequently developed their respective STEM-related projects. It also illuminates the alignments and tensions between STEM integration and various aspects of students’ self-directed learning, including intrinsic motivation, open-ended tasks, goal setting, design thinking, collaboration with external partners, curriculum constraint, and time management. The implications of the study encompass student autonomy and agency, the significance of authentic problems and themes in STEM education, and the role of curriculum in facilitating self-selected projects.

Science for All? School Science Education Policy and STEM Skills Shortages

ABSTRACT Whether enough highly qualified STEM workers are being educated and trained in the UK is an important question. The answer has implications not only for educators, employers and policymakers but also for individuals who are currently engaged in, or are considering entering, education or training in this area. Set against a policy backdrop that prioritises students studying more science for longer, this paper considers long-term patterns of participation in STEM education – from school science through to graduate entry into the highly skilled STEM labour market. Using a unique dataset that extends across seven decades and comprises many hundreds of thousands of students, the paper finds that patterns of participation in most STEM subjects have varied little over the period considered; suggesting that efforts to increase the numbers of students studying science in school has had limited impact on the throughput of students who study STEM, including the pure sciences, at university level and, subsequently, on the number of graduates who would be available to undertake highly skilled work in areas for which degree-level skills are a pre-requisite.

Learning contexts and visions for STEM in schools

ABSTRACT STEM education is viewed as being vital for economic prosperity and productivity; and can contribute productively to changing technological, economic, and social demands of the twenty-first Century. However, there is limited consensus on how STEM education is understood and taught, and inadequate discussion around its role in addressing global issues such as climate change, health, poverty, food security, and other STEM-related social concerns. In this paper, we identify the contexts adopted for STEM teaching and learning in 47 Australian schools, drawing data from semi-structured interviews with principals and teachers who participated in the Principals as STEM Leaders (PASL) project. These data were categorised according to four visions for STEM education that align with different levels of social justice and activist approaches to STEM teaching and learning. Findings indicate that STEM education in Australia is predominantly enacted through instrumental ‘products and processes’ approaches dominated by robotics and coding. Learning contexts had minimal ‘real-life’ applications and were devoid of social and ethical dimensions of STEM applications that would better equip students with the knowledge, skills, and agency to make informed, socially just decisions about their own and others’ futures, and that of our shared environment.

We Are All Treaty People

Within the Saskatchewan curriculum, one goal of K-12 education is ensuring that students come out of classrooms knowing that they, like all Canadians, are treaty people. This focus is touched on in select curriculum guides and within the Treaty Education Outcomes and Indicators document that has been in use by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education since 2013. While measures such as these have made the province seem to be ahead of other Canadian provinces in terms of Indigenous education, more needs to be done to ensure that this content is implemented into subject matter throughout the curriculum. The focus of this paper is on implementation methods and examples in high school Arts and STEM classrooms, as research from select organizations and from other Canadian education ministries reveals that Indigenous content can be implemented into the curricular outcomes present within these subjects. The culmination of this research looks into how the implementation of Indigenous content can aid in both the teaching of Canadian Reconciliation and in furthering the use of anti-oppressive education of which Indigenous education is a part.

Culturally Relevant STEM (CReST): An Integrated Support Curriculum for High School Chemistry and World History

Convergence education, driven by compelling or complex socio-scientific problems, is an approach to bring cultural relevance into secondary STEM education. National trends show the need to increase the STEM workforce by leveraging educational research and innovative practices within the secondary level to increase student interest prior to graduating high school. We introduced CReST (Culturally Relevant STEM) in a US high school pilot study. Student participants included 276 Chemistry students and 19 World History I students. The study also engaged four (4) high school teachers in chemistry and social studies with the challenge of cultural heritage conservation through the lens of the (physicochemical) life cycle of mural paintings in Europe. Teachers were provided with (1) professional development; (2) a digital curriculum; and (3) modular kits for hands-on learning. The research focused qualitatively on the experiences from the teacher and students as well as quantitatively to assess whether there was an increase in student academic performance. We found a statistically significant gain with respect to Chemistry (4.0%) and World History (13.4%) content. Students and teachers responded with overwhelming positivity in individual and focus-group interviews. This amplifies the further need of convergent educational approaches in high school STEM education to enhance engagement and increase student learning.

Students’ interests and attitudes toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers

<p>Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education teaches students critical thinking skills that they can use to solve problems even after they enter the workforce. This study aimed to i) determine student attitudes toward the STEM field in each school area; ii) determine student interest in the STEM field in each school area; and iii) determine the correlation between student attitudes toward the STEM field and school area and student interest in STEM. This was a quantitative study with a cross-sectional survey design. The sample for this study came from Boyolali Regency in Central Java, Indonesia, and was divided into three groups: rural schools (24%), suburban schools (36.2%), and urban schools (39%). The proportional stratified random sampling technique was used to select the research sample of students in grades 7–9. The Spearman Rank technique was used for data analysis. The results showed that there is a strong relationship between students’ attitudes toward STEM, school area, and interest in STEM careers. On the other hand, there is a weak correlation between students’ attitudes toward STEM, the school environment, and their interest in STEM careers.</p>

Unlocking Potential: Exploring the Socio-Economic Landscape of High School STEM Girls in Khulna and Rajshahi Districts

The Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education in Bangladesh permits students to choose a specialization based on aptitude, passion, and academic excellence that equips them for the college degree of their choice. So, the students who prefer the science stream are recognized as capable in all aspects. This study aims to explore the socio-economic characteristics of the STEM girls in Khulna and Rajshahi Districts of Bangladesh who are studying in classes IX and X in the science stream at secondary school, which assesses their ability to pursue STEM education. For this, the researchers have chosen a survey design. The study utilized 410 STEM girl students for a questionnaire survey from eight girls' high schools in Bangladesh's Khulna and Rajshahi districts. The schools were selected purposefully, and the students were selected randomly from classes nine and ten. Besides this, four focus group discussions (FGD) were conducted in four selected schools, where 44 (forty-four) participants attended and gave their opinions, comments, and observations. Data and information have been collected between July 2021 and June 2023. Using descriptive statistics and qualitative methods, socio-economic strands of the STEM girls have been explored, which cover their religious affiliation, age, marital status, educational qualifications of respondents' parents, occupational status of their parents, household-based income and expenditure analysis of the respondents' parents or guardians, information about family and siblings of the STEM girls, monthly expense analysis, and residential status. It was found that most of them are ahead of the national index of Bangladesh in some indexes. So, it is logical to claim that even though some STEM girls face severe problems, they are capable of studying STEM education in Bangladesh's existing framework.

Identifying Implementation Strategies for Integrating Drones into STEM and Career Technology Education CTE Programs

As drone technology is rapidly becoming accessible to school children in terms of both low cost and ease-of-use, primary and secondary school teachers are beginning to consider where modern drones can play an important role in schooling. To date, there is little empirical education research printed in the education research literature guiding innovative curriculum developers in the incipient domain of drone education. As a result, teachers interested in including emerging technologies in their classrooms are often at a loss of where to begin. Through clinical interviews with schoolteachers in the United States, our study identified five readily accessible “departure points” to include drones in contemporary STEM and vocational technology (CTE) school classrooms that help teachers address common curricular goals. Taken together, these interviews reveal that teachers using drones follow one of several distinct pathways as a first step toward achieving a widespread goal of teaching students to use modern technologies to construct, pursue, and communicate findings of fruitful research inquiries—the prevalence of which is not reflected in a comprehensive review of the literature. The five dominant pathways for starting a successful drone education emerging from the interview data were as follows: timed racing trials; precision flight obstacle courses; computer coding; videography; and domain-specific knowledge of drone operation laws and ethics.

STEM learning opportunities and career aspirations: the interactive effect of students’ self-concept and perceptions of STEM professionals

BackgroundStudents’ positive perceptions of scientists or engineers have been reported to be positively related to their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career aspirations. However, other research indicates that positive perceptions of experts in these fields might not necessarily lead to students’ pursuit of STEM careers. Self-concept, defined as one’s perceived abilities in specific academic domains, likely plays a moderating role in the relationship between perceptions and career aspirations according to the motivational theory of role modelling. Moreover, students’ perceptions of STEM professionals might be sourced from STEM-related media and school experiences. Therefore, through running a moderated mediation model, this study examined whether and how the influences of media consumption and school STEM learning opportunities on career aspirations would be mediated by perceptions of STEM professionals, and whether the mediation effect would be conditional on students’ self-concept.MethodsData were collected through an online survey of 608 primary and secondary school students from Hong Kong, and were analysed using structural equation modelling.ResultsResults revealed that the students’ positive perceptions of STEM professionals were positively associated with their career aspirations, and mediated the links from media consumption and school opportunities to career aspirations. In addition, this mediated pathway depended on STEM self-concept, such that perceptions of STEM professionals were only linked with STEM career aspirations for adolescents with average or high levels of self-concept.ConclusionsThe findings of this study suggest the need to pay attention to the STEM perceptions and self-concept interaction while designing and implementing learning activities to connect a diversity of students with STEM careers. It is not only important to foster students’ self-concept, but also to enrich their knowledge of diverse occupations, so as to help diversify their perceptions that being professionals in these fields is desirable and attainable, and to eventually inspire more student engagement and participation in STEM.

The effects of more informative grading on student outcomes

More granular grading scales provide a more accurate assessment of achievement and thus provide students with more informative feedback on their performance. Using Swedish administrative data and exploiting a natural experiment, we identify the effects of moving from a system with three passing grades to one with five passing grades. Students receiving more informative grades are less likely to graduate from high school, from academic high school tracks, and from STEM and art high school tracks. Affected students are also less likely to enrol in STEM courses at university. The evidence suggests discouragement as a likely mechanism, with students revising their self-belief downward when receiving more informative feedback.

Investigating STEM teachers’ personal and sociocultural particularities in the Ghanaian context

This paper argues that while the Ghanaian government has made significant investments in specialized STEM schools, there has been insufficient focus on the professional learning of STEM teachers, which includes aspects of identity and decision-making. By understanding the intricate connection between teachers' characteristics and their learning processes, effective initiatives can be designed to support STEM teachers in the country and even beyond. Through multiple case studies, this research explores how STEM teachers' personal and socio-cultural particularities interact with their learning experiences and effectiveness in Ghana. The findings underscore the interconnected nature of STEM teachers' characteristics, their learning experiences, and their effectiveness within the Ghanaian educational landscape in the Ghanaian context. This symbiotic relationship suggests that the personal and socio-cultural factors that shape STEM teachers' learning significantly impact their professional growth and effectiveness in the classroom. This study provides insights into teaching practices, enabling the development of inclusive, context-appropriate pedagogical approaches that engage students and boost their interest and success in STEM subjects.

Development of Design Thinking-Based Lesson on Schistosomiasis for Senior High School Learners

This study aimed to develop a Design Thinking-Based Lesson on Schistosomiasis (DTLS) for Grade 12 senior high school STEM learners. The respondents of the study were fifty-five (55) Grade 12 STEM learners for the pilot testing. This study was conducted at one of the public secondary schools in Davao City, Davao del Sur, Philippines, where the disease is prevalent. This study employed a quasi-experimental design with one group pretest-posttest. The lesson plan was developed following the principles of design thinking and tailored to address the issue of schistosomiasis comprehensively. Expert validation ensured the lesson plan’s alignment with educational standards and its potential effectiveness. The DTLS was rated excellent in all areas, with an overall mean of 3.87. Learners’ prototypes were evaluated using a rubric that measured critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration skills, which were all rated at proficient level with an overall mean of 3.23 for all groups. Results indicate that the DTLS significantly enhanced learners’ engagement and prototype quality across all assessed dimensions and was capable of developing the 4Cs. Furthermore, based on the results of the paired t-test, learners’ post-test mean score of 18.60 was considerably higher than their pre-test mean score of 13.69. This indicates that Grade 12 learners had a higher conceptual understanding of the topic of schistosomiasis (p = 0.00) after the DTLS integration. These findings suggest that incorporating DTLS into science education can effectively foster the 4Cs and improve learners’ conceptual understanding.

STEM Educators’ Perceptions of Gender Bias and the Contributing Factors that Persist for Women in STEM Education

Gender bias is considered an influencing factor that affects the decisions of female high school students to participate in STEM education. This action research used a convergent mixed method design to investigate perceptions of high school STEM educators pertaining to gender bias in STEM education. This descriptive study also sought to identify and examine the key factors that STEM educators perceived as influential factors for female high school students' participation in STEM education. Three main factors of influence - behavioral, individual, and environmental - were used to categorize the perceived factors of influence from the STEM educators’ perspectives. The perceptions of high school STEM educators regarding gender bias found biological influences, social norms, stereotypes of STEM students, and the underrepresentation of female students to be most significant.

ЗАДАЧИТЕ ОТ ОНЛАЙН СЪСТЕЗАНИЕТО „VIVA МАТЕМАТИКА С КОМПЮТЪР“ – РЕСУРС ЗА РАБОТА В STEM ЦЕНТРОВЕТЕ

It is shown how a well-known task, also used in the „VIVA Mathеmatics with Computer“ and “Theme of the Month” online competitions, can become a base for regular classes and/or explorations in school STEM centers. The task is related to a special case of the classical Holditch theorem and allows the development of various substantive studies using the GeoGebra system. The structure of the necessary GeoGebra auxiliary files for these studies is described. The analysis of the results of the participants in the mentioned competitions gives a reason to consider that the tasks in the article are accessible to students from upper secondary education. In addition to work in STEM centers, the article can be used in preparation for participation in the "VIVA Mathematics with a Computer" competition, as well as for developing skills for working on independent student research. The article would also be useful in the preparation of future teachers.

Students’ interest, engagement, and achievement in online high school science courses

Though documented extensively using self-report measures—especially in post-secondary course contexts—the relations among students’ interest, engagement, and academic achievement in high school science courses has been studied far less—especially when considering online versions of these courses. Self-reported interest collected at the beginning of the semester, process measures of emotional, behavioural, and cognitive engagement measured with textual analysis using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) measures of online discussion threads and time spent on the learning management system were collected throughout the semester, and final course grades were collected at the end of the semester. A sample of 622 high school students were recruited from five STEM courses to participate in this study. Results indicate that interest predicts behavioural engagement, behavioural and cognitive engagement predict final course grade, and interest predicts final course grade. Findings extend research by describing the role of engagement in online high school STEM courses.