Internalization of STEM Education

For many years the need to educate and support our teachers to implement science and mathematics education has been ongoing throughout the world (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019; Mundry et al., 2009). In more recent years, this call has extended to include teaching through integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects as a vehicle to learn disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and cross-cutting concepts (NGSS Lead States, 2013). This book includes three sections: Learning Contexts in Teaching of STEM Disciplines, STEM Teacher Education, and Components Related to Students' STEM Learning Experiences. The first section of this book explores two unique contexts in which STEM education is being developed. The first chapter describes the current literature on the application of SocioScientific Issues to teach STEM in inclusive settings. The second chapter describes the development of public residential STEM High Schools in Egypt, completely reimagining how STEM is addressed in that country. The second section will explore aspects of teacher professional development in STEM as well as the motivations for teachers to learn and improve their STEM pedagogy. Specifically, the first chapter illuminates teachers’ motivation and practices in STEM implementation. The second chapter describes the demands on and resources for STEM implementations for teachers and the effect these factors have on their job satisfaction. The third chapter in this section describes the analysis of video reflections and personal reflective accounts of a female preservice teacher, exploring self-efficacy, belonging, and identity in learning STEM content through the lens of gender. The final chapter also explores gender as a variable along with problem solving skills to explore the impact of these variables on STEM awareness levels of classroom teachers. These chapters illuminate challenges faced in preparing and developing STEM educators as well as the mindset and motivations of teachers in these fields. The last section dives into issues related to STEM learning experiences for students. The first chapter reports findings from a meta-analytic study investigating the relationship between self-efficacy and interest in a STEM career and the various student factors that influence this relationship. The second chapter analyzes the STEM identity from an international perspective. The final study investigates the effects of computer simulations on students’ conceptual understanding of physics and scientific ideas.

Dr. Augusto Z. Macalalag, Dr. Ismail Sahin, Dr. Joseph Johnson, Dr. Ali Bicer
Editors