Pre-Service Teachers’ STEM Perspectives and STEM Integrations

Abstract

In order to have a STEM implemented class, teachers need to hold certain skills and knowledge so that they can integrate technology and engineering concepts into their classroom practices. Learning science through engineering is challenging. If pre-service teachers’ thinking about STEM is understood, more collective and instructional representation related to pre-service science teachers’ learning about STEM education can be obtained. Therefore, for effective integration it is helpful to understand how pre-service teachers conceptualize STEM education. The purposes of this research were to identify pre-service physics teachers’ STEM perspectives and to examine role of their perspectives in their STEM integration. Multiple case study design was implemented for this research. The participants were pre-service physics teachers enrolling in a state university. Pre-Service Teacher STEM Education Survey was used to determine the participants’ STEM perspectives. Their lesson plans were examined to understand how they made STEM integration. Interviews were conducted to comprehend the role of pre-service teachers’ perspectives in their integration. The participants’ STEM perspectives were categorized as nested, transdisciplinary, interconnected, sequential, overlapping, and siloed. Engineering design process and real-world problem could be seen obviously in the lesson plans of the participants having transdisciplinary perspective. However, the participants seeing STEM components as sequential could not reflect this process to their lesson plans and wrote open-ended physics questions instead. Some participants whose perspectives could be categorized as soiled could not write performance goals and concepts to be taught. Results can be valuable in constructing theoretical framework of STEM education in teacher education programs.