STEM Education: A Foundation for the Future - Essay Sample

Introduction

Ministries of education all over the world have shifted their attention to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) for its elementary role to the economic growth of many counties. The STEM teaching model helps equip learners with various important values that have proven to shape most of the learners' decisions for more responsibility in the future. It is even more critical that the model has been introduced in lower levels of schooling to build a new foundation for the more complex STEM studies. This research proposal paper will focus on the middle school physics teaching model based on STEM education in China, its development, and the challenges that the system is facing in its implementation.

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Research Questions

• How has China incorporated the STEM model of teaching in its middle school level?
• What were the procedures for putting up the models of teaching, and how is the progress of the model's implementation?
• What are the challenges that the model is facing in its implementation?
• How are the implementers of the model working to minimize the challenges?

Research Objectives

• The research aims to identify the process of incorporation of STEM into the education system of China.
• The research aims to analyze the procedure of putting the STEM model into physics teaching in middle schools in China.
• The research aims to estimate the challenges that STEM teaching model implementation is facing.
• The research aims to identify the recommendations for dealing with the challenges that the model is facing.

Literature Review

Reviews from the United States of America show that the studies in STEM are growing with its integration, making up for the more significant part of the research date investigated. The most researched about a group of students includes K-12. The researchers suggest that the reviews done have taken into consideration an equal measure of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods of research. The research from the United States of America catered for about 65% of the studies, while the Asian countries accounted for a mere 8.5%. It was found that only about 29% of the articles employed equity account, while about only 35 of this used engineering plan for the pedagogical foundation. The above tendency does identify with Mizell and Brown’s account of 2016, which was based in the U.S. The studies that were found to deal with the STEM problems were those found to be only the ones dealing with engineering and were mainly focused on Science learning. Engineering is becoming the new focus as the number of studies done have increased from one in the year 2013 to about eight in 2017. In Asian countries, only a single study uses an engineering proposal as its pedagogical foundation (Lou et al., 2017). The study shows the significance of engineering design in the highest new areas of research. The past studies have confirmed that there is a gap pertaining preparation of teachers and their development professionally Cavlazoglu & Stuessy, 2017). The role played by teachers in equipping learners with significant STEM knowledge and tuning their career options related to STEM (Al Salami et al., 2017). Studies analyzing the choice of students in STEM careers affirmed that the expectations the teachers had on their students were influential in shaping the learner's choice (Lee et al., 2015).

There is a need for more investigation to be done on teacher training and development, although the phenomena are not surprising at all (Kelley & Knowles, 2016). The challenges these teachers face in mastering pedagogical content for a single subject will be amplified in the case of interdisciplinary STEM teaching. Teachers should design individual lessons that will require enough time and effort (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017). The barriers which are in three orders will need efforts to be negotiated (Tsai & Chai, 2012). In other words, STEM education is essential and a challenge for modern-day teachers and implementers who need to work and find solutions (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). Given the current status quo of STEM teaching, this special issue will focus on the above objectives that are first. This process preceded the implementation of STEM in middle school China, the procedure of application, the challenges facing its complete implementation, and how the facilitators are dealing with the problems (Pringle et al., 2015).

Significance of the Study

STEM is an integral portion of the new teaching process cycle. It is, therefore, vital that they study the implementation procedures of the STEM model in middle school China to get why they are not as widespread and what needs to be done to deal with the situation. In addition, the study will go a long way into explaining why the process of STEM implementation is the way it is and what needs to be done to make it efficient. From that, the study will look at the challenges that the facilitators are facing in implementing it and the possible remedies to the problems. The study thus adds to the studies before it on the STEM method of coaching in middle school China in science teaching, especially physics.

Research Methodology

The more extensive study will involve ten teachers, and mixed methods will be used to gather data on them. The study will also include other one hundred teachers who will be engaged in a qualitative survey (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). The participants will be physics teachers from different schools in mainland China. The study will compose and analyze evidence on primary, middle school teachers of physics about the implementation of the STEM model of teaching science learning in their institutions (Geelan, 2004). Surveys will be done, informal conversations held, interviews, classroom observations, and even taking of field summaries. The research that will be written in this paper will be scrutiny at ten teachers through quality analysis selected to embody a variety of vast heights of science schooling in China.

"Case studies offer more solid, context-dependent knowledge that research on learning shows to be relevant to allow people to develop from rule-based beginners t virtuoso experts," (Flyvbjerg, 2011, p. 302). The participants in this study will be physics teachers with not less than ten years' experience of teaching. All of them will bare minimum degree holders in physics training from recognized universities. They will be selected to be used as research sources to offer their knowledge of the study. The rationale that shall be used will be focused on the fact that different teachers have interacted with the model in their unique way, and that is why it will be essential to go for teachers from different schools (Luft & Roehrig, 2007).

Methods of data collection that will be used include interviews where the participants will receive individual discussions regarding science teaching using the STEM model for their subjects (Wallace & Kang, 2004). There shall also be classroom observations to evaluate how well the model is being delivered to the learners in the class. Informal conversations and field notes, too, will be among the data collections methods that shall be used.

References

Al Salami, M. K., Makela, C. J., & de Miranda, M. A. (2017). Assessing changes in teachers’ attitudes toward interdisciplinary STEM teaching. International Journal of Technology Design and Education, 27, 63–88.

Cavlazoglu, B., & Stuessy, C. (2017). Changes in science teachers’ conceptions and connections of STEM concepts and earthquake engineering. The Journal of Educational Research, 110(3), 239–254. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2016.1273176.

Denzin, N.K., & Lincoln, Y.S. ( 2005). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 1-32). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Flyvbjerg, B. (2011) "Case Study", in N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 4th Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 301–316.

Geelan, D.R. (2004). Weaving Narrative Nets to Capture Classrooms: Multimethod Qualitative Approaches for Research in Education. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Kelley, T. R., & Knowles, J. G. (2016). A conceptual framework for integrated STEM education. International Journal of STEM Education, 3(1), 11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-016-0046-z.

Lee, S. W., Min, S., & Mamerow, G. P. (2015). Pygmalion in the classroom and the home: Expectations’ role in the pipeline to STEMM. Teachers College Record, 117(9), 1–40.

Lou, S.-J., Chou, Y.-C., Shih, R.-C., & Chung, C.-C. (2017). A study of creativity in CaC2 steamship-derived STEM project-based learning. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics Science and Technology Education, 13(6), 2387–2404.

Luft, J. A., & Roehrig, G. H. (2007). Capturing science teachers' epistemological beliefs: The development of the teacher beliefs interview. Electronic Journal of Science Education, 11(2), 38- 63.

Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (2017). Epistemic fluency and professional education: Innovation, knowledgeable action and actionable knowledge. Dordrecht: Springer.

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017–1054.

Mizell, S., & Brown, S. (2016). The current status of STEM education research 2013–2015. Journal of STEM Education, 17(4), 52–56.

Pringle, R. M., Dawson, K., & Ritzhaupt, A. D. (2015). Integrating science and technology: Using technological pedagogical content knowledge as a framework to study the practices of science teachers. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 24(5), 648–662.

Tsai, C.-C. & Chai, C. S. (2012). The “third”-order barrier for technology-integration instruction: Implications for teacher education. In C. P. Lim & C. S. Chai (Eds.), Building the ICT capacity of the next generation of teachers in Asia. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 28 (Special issue, 6) (pp. 1057–1060). http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet28/tsai-cc.html

Wallace, C. S., & Kang, N. (2004). An investigation of experienced secondary science teachers" beliefs about inquiry: An examination of competing belief sets. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41(9), 936-960.