The Future of Education

There has recently been an increase in scholarship devoted to developing the conceptual, theoretical, and practical implications of integrated STEM education in primary schools. The literature claims that integrated STEM education increases students’ interest in and engagement with STEM fields and better prepares students for the future STEM workforce in which disciplines are interrelated and integrated in nature. However, there has not been a large amount of scholarship demonstrating how to prepare current teachers in integrated STEM education. On the other hand, well-grounded research is already available in the field of effective teacher professional development (PD). Therefore, in this study, a systematic review of empirical studies was undertaken to understand how current PD practitioners designed and delivered training in integrated STEM education for primary school teachers. Then, the emerging commonalities among these studies were discussed within the scope of the literature on effective teacher professional development. The details of the identification, inclusion, and elimination processes, including screening and eligibility stages were presented in the PRISMA Flow Chart, and abstracts were examined based on the following criteria: 

1.     Integration was aimed explicitly and intentionally in PD.

2.     Integration was integral to the activities rather than peripheral. 

3.     The analysis specifically presented the results and implications for

the primary school teachers’ learning and application of integrated STEM practices in PD.

Based on this initial query, a pool of studies was closely reviewed again beyond their abstracts. In some studies, teachers were only expected to teach the content following the script. As the aim of these PDs was not to change teacher knowledge, skill, or behavior, these studies were extracted. At the end of this process, 26 studies were included in this current review. Lawless and Pellegrino (2007)’s schema to review teacher PD programs was adapted, and the included studies were inquired into in terms of (a) their types—duration, content, and delivery—, (b) the unit of analysis or what was evaluated in PD—student, program, or teacher outcomes—, and (c) the contextual elements or factors that the reviewed studies employed in organizing and enacting integrated STEM PD programs. Based on this in-depth analysis, the common features in the reviewed studies were discussed in terms of how they aligned with the literature on effective PD. Implications were presented to lay the groundwork for future STEM-integrated PD programs for primary school teachers.

Keywords: integrated STEM, teacher professional development, systematic literature review, primary teachers.

References:

• Lawless, K.A., & Pellegrino, J.W. (2007). Professional development in integrating technology into teaching and learning: Knowns, unknowns, and ways to pursue better questions and answers. Review of Educational Research, 77(4), 575–614.