Pre-Service Teachers’ STEM Perspectives and STEM Integrations

Year 2018, Volume: 9 , 23 - 27, 18.08.2018

Feral Ogan-bekiroglu Fatma Caner

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.  

Keywords

STEM, Pre-service Teachers, Perspective, Integration

References

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