Understanding STEM Education in a SMuh Education World

By Stephen Portz (’13-’14 Albert Einstein Fellow)

Our President has identified the STEM initiative as a critical National Security Issue – “if we do not improve the quality and quantity of science, engineering and math students as well as the general technological literacy of our workers, our country will lose significant quality of life and world leadership standing.” (Moravec, 2010).

Our Nation's STEM Initiative - the curriculum integration
of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math instruction.

As a career and technical education (CTE) teacher with little familiarity teaching in anyway other than STEM, the STEM movement has been intriguing to watch. The purpose of our CTE programs is to prepare students for the workplace. To this end each program involves integrating the academic curriculum and delivering instruction in the context of how the skills are used in the world of work. Since I am also an engineering technology teacher, which represents two of the four spokes on the STEM wheel, I believe that I have a really good grasp of what STEM Education is supposed to be. That said, part of me was excited about the STEM movement because it is as if the entire world is waking up to what CTE teachers and industry experts have always known - that students learn best when academic skills are taught contextually in integrated real world applications, and not simply as discrete skills. Unfortunately, the other part of me is now perplexed, because as I look around, I am not seeing practitioners that seem to understand what STEM Education is supposed to look like.

 

Can You Pass Me Some More SMuh Please?

STEM Education without the T-Technology, and E-Engineering portions is not STEM, it is simply SMuh. There is no hierarchy in this model, so none of these subjects is more or less important than the other. If any one of the elements is missing it is not STEM. While methods of delivery may differ from district to district, the principle is unbending; if you do not treat STEM as an integrated system it is not STEM (Sanders, 2012). If your instructional strategy is not integrating science, technology, engineering, and math as a cohesive unit, it will not have its desired effect and all you will have is SMuh. Which begs the question, if the STEM movement calls attention to the problem but then does nothing to break from the traditional academic math and science model, what good is it?


I think the reason many districts are struggling with the implementation of STEM is they are unclear what the technology and engineering pieces are supposed to look like. Many believe that covering the Technology piece is simply about giving their students iPads or laptops to use in a science or math class.

Few leaders forming district, state, and national education policy have much experience with Engineering, so implementation there is lacking. Technologies are the products of engineers. The work of scientists is to make discoveries in their questioning of WHY. The work of engineers is HOW to take scientific discoveries and design them into products for economic and societal benefits. It stands to reason then, if our students are not engaging in engineering activity that leads to technological creation, they are likewise not actively involved in STEM Education.

The Essential Importance of Integration

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) speaks highly of the importance of content integration. The fact that a major portion of the standards addresses the need to recognize crosscutting concepts is both affirming and condemning. It is affirming in that it recognizes how powerful it is when our students make connections with other concepts, applications, and disciplines. It is condemning in that by raising the notion of crosscutting concepts to such a level of importance in the standards, it is an admission that previously it was not being done.

NGSS gives further encouragement for the ideas of subject integration: “Students should not be presented with instruction leading to one performance expectation in isolation, rather bundles of performances provide greater coherence...also allow(s) students to see the connected nature of science and the practices.” (NGSS, Volume 1, 2013)

Are Science Teachers Qualified to Teach Engineering?

While the NGSS recognizes the prominence that engineering must have in the curriculum to satisfy the President's charge, its solution is to have science teachers teach engineering in addition to their science curriculum:
“Science and engineering are integrated into science education by raising engineering design to the same level as scientific inquiry in science classroom instruction at all levels and by emphasizing the core ideas of engineering design and technology applications.” (NGSS, Volume 2, 2013)

Air Rockets activity with after school program students 
at the Richard Byrd Library - Alexandria, VA

As far as this model goes to support STEM, the fact remains that science teachers are very poorly equipped to teach engineering: “Few science teachers have had even one engineering course. The faculty members who prepare future teachers...have limited experience with engineering education. Thus the current generation of teachers has not been prepared to incorporate engineering into science teaching”... and, “Even if science teachers did have appropriate preparation in engineering education...the science curriculum is already filled. There is insufficient time to do justice to current science topics, much less add a new layer of new requirements.”(Bull and Slykhuis, 2013, p. 1).

Another concern with the “have science teachers teach engineering” model is the imperative that whoever conducts engineering instruction have a background in the requirements of industry – how is engineering used in the workplace? “Studies are converging on a view of engineering education that not only requires students to develop a grasp of traditional engineering fundamentals, such as mechanics, dynamics, mathematics, and technology, but also to develop the skills associated with learning to imbed this knowledge in real-world situations.”(NGSS, Volume 2, 2013, p. 16)

Since a traditional science educator would have gone through the typical teacher preparation program in college, it is unlikely that many would have had any industrial work related experience. How is a science teacher in this situation going to be able to effectively demonstrate and explain the work of an engineer when they do not understand it and have never done it themselves?

If NGSS seeks to raise engineering design to the levels of scientific inquiry, are science teachers prepared to teach engineering design? A significant tool of engineering design is a 3D parametric design program. With this application, engineers are able to virtually model designed parts and assemblies, return to past iterations, run finite element analysis, animations, mechanical, thermal, and fluids simulations all from a desktop. (Hayes, Goel, Tumer, Agognino & Regli, 2011).

To neglect the preeminence of 3D modeling in an engineering toolkit and reduce engineering design to a notion of experimental trials in the fashion of scientific inquiry does grave injustice to the discipline:
“Design thinking represents a sophisticated ability to scope problems, consider the alternatives, develop solutions....and optimize products iteratively using STEM skills.”And, “Engineering design is difficult to learn, teach, and assess, and is studied less than scientific inquiry.” (Katehi, Person, & Feder, 2009).

Without instruction in engineering design and its associated tools, our students will not be able to access emerging desktop manufacturing and the forthcoming revolution in industrial design, innovation, and entrepreneurship. “Engineering experience and understanding is required to take advantage of emerging desktop manufacturing capabilities, many teachers do not fully understand engineering, engineering habits of mind, or design thinking.” (Berry, Bull, Chiu, Lipson, Xie, 2013).

STEM Models to Consider

I have long held the belief that the STEM crisis in our educational system did not happen despite our best efforts at educating students, but was more likely caused by it. Our silo thinking philosophy of academic instruction, which leaves many students behind, is not founded in research in how students learn best or in the requirement of real-world application. Turning back to an academic model as the solution to the problem that was most likely caused by this mindset is flawed circular reasoning. Clearly, if the challenge to effectively teach engineering education is beyond the scope of what science teachers can perform, what should be done?


The T and E of STEM are the applied portions. Just as in college, many science courses cannot be adequately covered without the lab course which is taken concurrently with the academic course; so to, for STEM to work it must include opportunities for hands on engineering design work creating technology. One way to do this would be require a T and E lab course in concert with math and science offerings. By having a dedicated engineering course of study along with their academic courses, students learn to ply their academic and technological skills in the context of how they will be used in the world of work.


Similarly, career academies with an engineering or technology focus gather student cohorts and establish a school within a school small learning community. History has shown that if you desire to build and accelerate growth and capacity in an area, one of the best ways to do it is to gather it as a community. STEM career academies accomplish this by attracting students with similar career interests and structuring their academic program around the interest. STEM academy students share common academic teachers along with an engineering or technology teacher. This teaching team coordinates curriculum and instruction to align with the students shared career interests to focus the instruction where it will be of the most usefulness and interest to the academy students.


Some examples of how STEM career academy teams can do this are with thematic units that are cross curricular. Students studying Greek and Roman civilizations in history class can find intersections with the literature of those times in language arts class as well as the civil engineering and weapons technologies in their CTE class.


As previously mentioned, a significant barrier to the integration of engineering and technology in math and science classes can be with the math and science instructors themselves, if they cannot communicate to their students how the skills they are teaching are utilized in the world of work. This is where industries can help with teacher externing and summer industrial fellowships.


A vocational business exchange program (VIBE) matches teachers with industry and grants up to 80 hours of paid placement with a local industry. I participated in just such an experience with NASA when their electrical engineering group was renovating the Space Shuttle Launch Control Complex. At the time it provided me with a state of the art experience in computer aided design and the use of smart schematics. In another example, STEM teachers are provided with industrial work experiences during their summer break. This model provides a win, win, win, solution as businesses and industry does their part to enhance education and provide for a strong pipeline of future talent; Teachers benefit by better understanding how academic skills are used in the workplace and they realize enhanced credibility with their students as they relate the experience back to classroom practice; but the real beneficiary are the students who can then make better connections between the classrooms skills and future jobs.


There are very successful models across the nation that integrate academic instruction with an engineering CTE program to create effective STEM instruction. Such programs replicate engineering design activity through the use of project based learning (PBL) which naturally integrate STEM subjects: “...the STEM PBL challenges provide students with authentic real-world problems captured and re-enacted in a multi-media format designed to emulate the real-world context in which the problems were encountered and solved.” (Massa, DeLaura, Dischino, Donnelly, Hanes, 2012).


Anytime a teacher makes a requirement for students to learn, collaborate, or produce a project using the appropriate technology, they leverage the learning gains by not only providing learning content in a compelling way, but in the context of how it is used in the world. As we do this, we provide our students with the skill set for tomorrow’s workplace. That is the true charge of the STEM movement.


When we give our students opportunities to make connections with academic content and real-world technological applications, our students will learn better, our industries will have a skilled workforce, and the President's charge will be answered.




Stephen Portz is an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow, placed with the National Science Foundation. Prior to this appointment, he worked for Brevard Public Schools in Florida where he has taught Engineering and Technology for 25 years. Sportz.einsteinfellow@gmail.com


Berry, R., Bull, G., Chiu, J., Lipson, H., Xie, C. (2013). Advancing Children's Education Through Desktop Manufacturing.

Bull, G. and Slykhuis, D. (2013). NTLS Design Challenge: Science & Engineering Strand.

Hayes, C. C., Goel, A. K., Tumer, I. Y., Agognino, A. M., & Regli, W. C., (2011). Intelligent Support for Product Design: Looking Backward, Looking Forward. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 11(2), 021007.

Katehi, L., Pearson, G., & Feder, M. (2009). Engineering in K-12 Education. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

Massa, N., DeLaura, J., A., Dischino, M., Donnelly, J. F., Hanes, F., D. (2012). Problem Based Learning in a Pre-Service Technology and Engineering Course. American Society of Engineering Education.

Moravec (2010) “Obama: Education is a National Security Issue.” Educational Futures. Jan 7, 2010.
Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. 2013. Volume 1: The Standards. Achieve Press Inc., Washington DC.

Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. 2013. Volume 2: Appendixes. Achieve Press Inc., Washington DC.

Sanders, M. (2012). Integrative STEM Education as “Best Practice,” International Technology Education Research Conference, Queensland, Australia.