Designing iSTEM Learning Materials for Secondary Education

To deal with the complex challenges of the future, education is needed that prepares students for becoming the scientifically- and technically-literate and broadly-employable workforce the labor market is looking for. European reports emphasizes the importance of crossdisciplinary skills, such as problem solving, creativity, and critical thinking. They propagate an interdisciplinary approach towards learning that reflects reality, with inquiry- and design-based learning as a way to shape this approach. Interdisciplinarity among Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) will be established in education when the natural links between the disciplines are exposed, when the discipline-specific learning contents are addressed from a crossdisciplinary perspective, or, in other words, when the STEM disciplines are integrated. Through meaningful connections among the separate STEM curricula, integrated STEM (iSTEM) education is believed to pique students' interest for STEM subjects, and to deepen their conceptual understanding. However, this new approach towards STEM education calls for the design of new curricular materials. Research literature on instructional reform indicates that the buy-in of such materials is increased when teachers are given a voice in the decisions and the design process. The effectiveness of a reform is determined by the professional input as well as by the learning curve of the teachers themselves. This work investigates teachers' strategies and learning gains when engaging in collaborative design of iSTEM learning materials. The aim of this work is to provide STEM teachers, teacher educators, and other stakeholders in secondary education with valuable information to give their team a kick-start into designing learning materials for high-quality iSTEM education. To this end, a 4-year case study was conducted, in which four multidisciplinary teams of STEM teachers were followed up-close in their endeavors to design such materials for subsequent implementation in their classrooms. From the observations and the outputted materials of the teams, important steps and pitfalls in their design processes were identified, as well as fruitful strategies to connect contents from different STEM disciplines. These findings were integrated into a support model for iSTEM teacher design teams: CODEM for iSTEM. After the case study, several participants were interviewed on their experiences and perception of own professional growth with respect to the co-design of iSTEM learning materials. Their reflections were compared to those of teachers who merely implemented the learning materials in the classroom. Teachers were observed to converse on a crossdisciplinary level, formulate engaging student challenges, and manage to establish meaningful connections between the STEM disciplines in the light of these challenges. While doing so, teachers testify to have learned a lot from their colleagues in other disciplines. They value this crossfertilization as an important feature of participation in iSTEM teacher design teams. However, their attention must systematically be drawn to the desired student outcomes and strategies to attain these, as the teacher teams tend to focus on creating or conducting hands-on activities with little educational value. This is due to the fact that they did not outline the desired learning outcomes in the first place. Furthermore, teachers risk resorting to a mere discipline-specific approach to the student challenge they formulated, which should be prevented from happening. CODEM for iSTEM is a support tool that comprises the important steps with guidelines and scaffolding questions, as well as quality checks to avoid the pitfalls. Accompanied by the necessary coordination, this tool is implementable in teacher education, as participation in iSTEM teacher design teams going through these steps holds promising opportunities for teacher learning. Teachers of successful iSTEM teacher design teams exhibit a high level of metacognitive thinking and an improved attitude towards problem solving. They seem to have established a strong, multidisciplinary learning community at their school, and the momentum to maintain it. This work suggests to employ CODEM for iSTEM as leverage to lift secondary-school STEM education to high-quality integrated STEM education, as it is an inventory of knowledge and experiences gathered during 4 years of research and development. CODEM for iSTEM is an action plan that can give inspiration and direction to the design process, and can help to not overlook crucial considerations. Participation in iSTEM teacher design teams provides a powerful concept for professional development programs. CODEM for iSTEM can be used to guide such programs, if it is complemented with frequent exchange of feedback, and close follow-up by the program coordinators. It is recommended to extend its application beyond the design phase, to the implementation phase, in which the designed learning materials are reviewed based on the degree to which the student outcomes correspond with the targeted iSTEM learning goals.

Publication year:2019

Accessibility:Open