STEM Education in Primary Classrooms

Unravelling Contemporary Approaches in Australia and New Zealand

Angela Fitzgerald, Carole Haeusler, Linda Pfeiffer, Angela Fitzgerald, Carole Haeusler, Linda Pfeiffer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000051421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

If you were to peer into a primary school classroom somewhere across Australia and New Zealand, you would be forgiven for thinking that science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education is synonymous with coding and digital technologies. However, while these aspects are important, technology alone does not reflect the broad learning opportunities afforded by STEM.

In countering this narrow approach, STEM Education in Primary Classrooms offers a platform for research that innovates, excites and challenges the status quo. It provides educators with innovative and up-to-date research into how to meaningfully and authentically embed STEM into existing classroom practices. It incorporates accurate explanations of STEM as an integrated approach to solving real-world problems, including social issues, along with case studies and stories to bring practice to life in evidence-informed ways.

This book showcases the impact of a broader approach to STEM in the primary classroom through Australian-based and New Zealand-based research that will challenge current teaching practices. Thus, this book will be of interest to pre- and in-service primary school teachers, along with researchers and postgraduate students in the STEM education field.

1

MORE THAN CODING

Positioning STEM education in policy and practice

Angela Fitzgerald, Carole Haeusler and Linda Pfeiffer

Introduction

A key element significantly influencing this collection is that nearly all of the contributors are passionate primary science teacher educators. Individually and collectively, we strive in our institutions, across Australia and stretching into New Zealand, to equip future primary school teachers with the appropriate knowledge, skills and attributes to be both learners and teachers of science. In achieving our goals, however, we recognise the science education landscape is rapidly changing and morphing as the integration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) into our education policies, systems and classrooms continues to grow in size and stature, both nationally and internationally. Therefore, to remain contemporary and cutting edge, science teacher educators have been required to grapple with what STEM education means to them and how science can be harnessed as a vehicle for meaningful and authentic STEM learning and teaching. This book is a result of navigating these tensions.

As referred to through the title of this chapter, the development of coding knowledge and skills is a national government priority in Australian schools. Coding is to be ‘taught’ across all the compulsory years of schooling from 2020, which in this context means from foundation (students aged around five years) to year 10 (students aged around 16 years). This form of technology alone, however, does not necessarily address the depth and breadth of learning and teaching that quality pedagogical approaches to STEM affords. STEM education is certainly much more than the integration of digital technologies into practice. In countering this narrow vision, this book intends to provide voice to how primary science teacher educators have undertaken innovative and contemporary research to better understand how to meaningfully and authentically embed STEM into existing classroom and, more broadly, educational practices by using science as a starting point.

In providing a segue into this collection, this chapter sets the scene by first delving into what STEM is and its prominent position in Australian educational policy, in particular, before exploring how STEM education can be understood through the lens of science and articulated in practice. The chapters in the collection are largely positioned in the Australian educational context; therefore, the policies and practices of this setting are foregrounded across the collection. Links are made to the New Zealand context, but not to the same depth or extent. This chapter concludes by sharing the thinking behind how this collection has been structured and provides brief insights into what each chapter covers. These insights draw on national and international trends to provide a framing for the diverse array of chapters that were designed to push thinking about the possibilities inherent in wholeheartedly engaging with STEM learning and teaching in primary education contexts.

Navigating the STEM education landscape

STEM education is everybody’s business. In order to prosper as a society, STEM education needs to be a focus for all stakeholders and at all levels. From the early years right through to senior high school, STEM education and its principles need to be embedded in everyday life and across the wider community. STEM experiences need to involve the appropriate skill development and understandings of the scientific process for teachers, schools, industry, parents and the wider community, who make up society and are the influencers of children, who hold the future in their hands. Inquiry approaches and STEM project opportunities for everyone are essential for improving future STEM educational outcomes for all.

—Linda, chapter author

The acronym of STEM was itself coined by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States in the mid 1990s (Jolly, 2017). In the following two decades, however, there has been a lack of clarity in the definition, which has caused confusion and uncertainty. The result is that STEM has been used to describe anything related to any one or any combination of the four discipline areas: science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Jolly, 2017). Among educators, some agreement has emerged on a common understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of the construct of STEM and what it can achieve. The following quotes are illustrative of this:

STEM education is an interdisciplinary approach to learning that removes the traditional barriers separating the four disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and integrates them into real-world, rigorous, and relevant learning experiences for students.

(Vasquez, Sneider, & Comer, 2013, p. 4)

STEM education involves solving real-world challenges by establishing relationships between the four disciplines with the objective of expanding people’s abilities by supporting technical and scientific education with a strong emphasis on critical and creative-thinking skills.

(Siekmann & Korbel, 2016, p. 8)

Although a critical component of STEM education is an interdisciplinary approach, the importance of a solid grounding in the individual disciplines should not be underestimated. As Alan Finkel, Australia’s chief scientist, eloquently expressed, ‘a musician must master the instrument before they can master playing in an orchestra. . . . Students, focus on your discipline, then you’ll see your options expand’ (Finkel, 2018, p. 4). In the context of this book, an interpretation of these definitions and quotes might be that the development of conceptual knowledge and skills remain key to classroom practice alongside the integration of STEM-focused activities and projects. This is equally true for students and their teachers.

STEM and its prominence in education cannot be fully understood without first acknowledging the global trends in science and mathematics. These trends can be best recognised and represented through the lens of international testing. Two large-scale and widely cited international tests have been conducted since the 1990s that provide a baseline for student performance: Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine or critique these assessment processes, a broad-brush comment would be that PISA and TIMSS have boosted the profile of science and mathematics education worldwide, leading to increased scrutiny and subsequent funding. This has particularly been the case as decreasing performances in science and mathematics across the board have refocused global education priorities. A key response has been the rise in a STEM agenda as driven by politicians and policymakers as a way to improve the scientific and mathematical knowledge and skills of students and their teachers and ultimately the test scores of those students.

In the context of the Australian STEM landscape, two key policy documents are having a significant influence on STEM education and the direction that it should take:

1. The National STEM School Education Strategy (Education Council, 2015) provides an overarching framework to unpack the interconnected nature of how education and industry are operating in each state/territory jurisdiction.
2. The Advancing Education: An action plan for education in Queensland (Department of Education & Training, 2016) clearly articulates the importance of using partnerships and networks to align with national STEM goals.

Alongside this, in the primary schooling context, the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) released a position paper at the end of 2015 – Transforming STEM teaching in Australian primary schools: Everybody’s business – that also has a key role to play in how STEM education is being positioned in this country. The paper (Prinsley & Johnston, 2015) proposed the following three steps of action to raise the profile and quality of STEM education in Australian primary schools:

1. Raise the prestige and preparedness of teachers through attracting high achievers and boosting rigour in pre-service education.
2. Transform STEM education through specialist teachers, national professional development and support for principals to be STEM leaders.
3. Think bold, collaborate and lead change.

Three years on from the OCS report, there is a focus across the country to moving towards STEM specialist teachers in primary schools, which is being supported through education departments employing STEM champions to provide targeted professional development and relevant connections. Interestingly, while this has resulted in a greater emphasis on STEM in primary schools, in reality, many are implementing technology and coding under the misguided understanding that this meets the STEM agenda.

In New Zealand, while STEM education is certainly part of the national conversation (e.g. Buntting, Jones, McKinley, & Gan, 2018), it has not dominated policy and practice to the same extent as it has in Australia. The general focus is, however, quite similar in terms of being economically oriented towards the potential of STEM professions in enhancing the workforce and how best to equip students with the skills and knowledge that they will require for the STEM disciplines.

Framing STEM education through the lens of science

Primary-aged children are inherently interested in science and understanding how the world works. They also live in a world with serious environmental and technological challenges that rely on solutions dependent on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking. The big ideas of science are both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and thus provide a conceptual basis for STEM initiatives in education and beyond. By choosing real-world scenarios and challenges as teaching contexts, STEM education is an exciting way of enhancing children’s natural curiosity in science and showing them the relevance of science to their future.

Carole, chapter author

As STEM builds a steady presence in classrooms across Australia and New Zealand, debate over what constitutes quality STEM education is becoming more prominent (Bybee, 2013; English, 2017; Honey, Pearson, & Schweingruber, 2014). STEM education is generally accepted as requiring an integrated approach to curriculum development and implementation, so that it reflects the interdisciplinary approach required to address the complex technological, health and environmental and demands of the 21st century.

Nadelson and Seifert (2017) place the existing approaches to STEM education on a spectrum. One end of the spectrum is the traditional segregated teaching of STEM disciplines (e.g. traditional physics, mathematics, technology), and the other is a fully integrated approach to STEM where there is a seamless amalgamation of content and concepts from multiple disciplines similar to that applied in professional interdisciplinary teams (e.g. climate, environmental management, agriculture). In between lies a mixed approach where the concepts of STEM disciplines are applied in problem-solving contexts. An example of how STEM concepts are applied is a grade six problem-solving project on the design and construction of a building that will withstand earthquakes that involves all four STEM disciplines (English, King, & Smeed, 2017).

In terms of STEM education in practice, Bryan and colleagues (2015) and English (2017) do not advocate total content integration, because they believe that students’ learning of core disciplinary concepts and process may be compromised. To allay these concerns and avoid poorly constructed STEM curricula, these researchers advocate that teachers be both intentional and specific when selecting the context and content for STEM learning and teaching. An example of this approach is documented in the work of King and English (2016), where they provide evidence of success from a STEM-oriented activity that applies the concepts of light in science and measurement in mathematics to build an optical instrument.

In support of efficacious STEM curricula, Chalmers, Carter, Cooper and Nason (2017) advocate that a big-ideas approach to STEM learning and teaching will facilitate students’ construction of in-depth STEM knowledge. STEM big ideas are those that link to form a coherent whole. There are three types:

1. Within-discipline big ideas that have application in other STEM disciplines (e.g. energy, scale).
2. Cross-disciplinary big ideas (e.g. patterns, models).
3. Encompassing big ideas (e.g. conservation, relationships).

A big-ideas approach views STEM learning as progressing towards an understanding of key ideas, which differs from a silo approach, where individual STEM disciplines are viewed as bodies of knowledge. Science is ideally situated for this approach to STEM, because the big ideas of science (Harlen, 2010, 2011) have applications in other STEM disciplines (e.g. force and motion, atomic theory, energy) and are cross-disciplinary (e.g. reasoning and argument, hypothesis testing) and encompassing (e.g. systems, relationships, change). Therefore, considering STEM from the perspective of science will provide an integrative framework and allow students the opportunity to build in-depth STEM knowledge.

With this perspective in mind, this collection has chosen to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• 1 More than coding: positioning STEM education in policy and practice
• 2 Engaging diverse students in STEM: the five dimensions framework
• 3 Inquiry-based teaching and learning in primary STEM
• 4 Learning mathematics through STEM in a play-based classroom
• 5 A case study of a university-industry STEM partnership in regional Queensland
• 6 Online citizen science in the classroom: engaging with real science and STEM to develop capabilities for citizenship
• 7 School—university partnerships as rich STEM learning contexts for pre-service teachers working with primary students
• 8 What do primary teachers think about STEM education? Exploring cross-cultural perspectives
• 9 The role of the Maker Faire in STEM engagement: messages for teacher professional development
• 10 More than STEM: connecting students' learning to community through eco-justice
• 11 Informal spaces for STEM learning and teaching: STEM clubs
• Index