This book provides an international platform for educators from different STEM disciplines to present, discuss, connect, and develop collaborations in two inter-related ways: (1) sharing and discussing changes and innovations in individual discipline-based education in STEM/STEAM, and (2) sharing and discussing the development of interdisciplinary STEM/STEAM education. Possible relationships and connections between individual disciplines (like mathematics or physics) and STEM education remain under explored and the integration of traditionally individual discipline-based education in STEM education is far from balanced. Efforts to pursue possible connections among traditionally separated individual disciplines in STEM are not only necessary for the importance of deepening and expanding interdisciplinary research and education in STEM, but also for the ever-increasing need of reflecting on and changing how traditional school subjects (like mathematics or physics) can and should be viewed, taught, and learned. Scholars from eight countries/regions provide diverse perspectives and approaches on changes and innovations in STEM disciplinary and interdisciplinary education. Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Education in STEM will be a great resource to students and researchers in STEM education as well as STEM curriculum developers and teacher educators internationally.

This book focuses on constructivist theory and collaborative interdisciplinary studies, showing how constructivist theory complements interdisciplinary studies. Constructivist theory stresses how learners construct new ideas and concepts, while the interdisciplinary method requires that learners approach complex problems from multiple perspectives. The author uses the New York City College of Technology as a model to demonstrate how learning can be embedded in complex, realistic, and relevant environments. As a result, students learn to consider significant issues from a variety of viewpoints and thus negotiate their social landscape. In approaching problems that they recognize as meaningful, they take ownership of their learning and become increasingly self-aware. This scholarly book makes a theoretical contribution to its field while also offering a practical, real world example of how to successfully integrate a curriculum.

STEM Teaching: An Interdisciplinary Approach breaks from the more historical idea of making knowledge within disciplines and seeks to engage the reader in a growing conversation that is gaining momentum and is focused on an ‘interdisciplinarity of STEM education’, which seeks to embrace and/or present emerging perspectives on the standards. Importantly, the conversation on STEM education and interdisciplinary approaches to teacher preparation may draw into specific relief the respective professional and/or disciplinary standards for each of the four STEM disciplines as each relates to fostering an interdisciplinary approach. The importance and relevance of this interdisciplinary perspective to teacher preparation lies in the realization that STEM literacy moves into everyday lives and thinking, and not just in STEM related disciplines. This means that faculty in teacher preparation need to extend the range of STEM literacy in pedagogical strategies so that STEM teaching is enriched with multimodal literacies into teaching and learning, which in turn makes STEM knowledge more relevant and engaging for its manifest connections to solving the problems that challenge society.

This text contains 25 Project-Based Learning (PBL) lessons written by a combination of undergraduate preservice teachers, inservice teachers, and graduate students. Everyone who wrote a chapter strives to improve STEM education to help others implement standards-based STEM instruction that takes learning in isolation to greater accountability through integrated and meaningful tasks that answer the question every teacher dreads: When am I going to use this? The PBLs were written to implement in middle and high-school classrooms. All of them are interdisciplinary in nature. We have divided them into six themes: construction and design, water, environment, mixtures, technology, nutrition and genetics. Each lesson contains a “schedule at a glance” and the “well-defined outcome” so you can quickly see how a particular PBL fits into your curriculum. Objectives are listed along with STEM connections written as objectives. We have included all materials needed and then each day of activities including an imbedded engagement, exploration, explanation, evaluation (including rubrics), and extension. We have tried to include everything necessary for successful implementation. This practical book is the perfect companion to the handbook for learning about implementing PBLs: Project-Based Learning: An Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Approach – second edition.

This book chronicles the revolution in STEM teaching and learning that has arisen from a convergence of educational research, emerging technologies, and innovative ways of structuring both the physical space and classroom activities in STEM higher education. Beginning with a historical overview of US higher education and an overview of diversity in STEM in the US, the book sets a context in which our present-day innovation in science and technology urgently needs to provide more diversity and inclusion within STEM fields. Research-validated pedagogies using active learning and new types of research-based curriculum is transforming how physics, biology and other fields are taught in leading universities, and the book gives profiles of leading innovators in science education and examples of exciting new research-based courses taking root in US institutions. The book includes interviews with leading scientists and educators, case studies of new courses and new institutions, and descriptions of site visits where new trends in 21st STEM education are being developed. The book also takes the reader into innovative learning environments in engineering where students are empowered by emerging technologies to develop new creative capacity in their STEM education, through new centers for design thinking and liberal arts-based engineering. Equally innovative are new conceptual frameworks for course design and learning, and the book explores the concepts of Scientific Teaching, Backward Course Design, Threshold Concepts and Learning Taxonomies in a systematic way with examples from diverse scientific fields. Finally, the book takes the reader inside the leading centers for online education, including Udacity, Coursera and EdX, interviews the leaders and founders of MOOC technology, and gives a sense of how online education is evolving and what this means for STEM education. This book provides a broad and deep exploration into the historical context of science education and into some of the cutting-edge innovations that are reshaping how leading universities teach science and engineering. The emergence of exponentially advancing technologies such as synthetic biology, artificial intelligence and materials sciences has been described as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the book explores how these technologies will shape our future will bring a transformation of STEM curriculum that can help students solve many the most urgent problems facing our world and society.

This edited volume focuses on the reform and research of STEM education from international perspectives considering the sociocultural perspectives of different educational contexts. It shows the impact of political and cultural contexts on the reform of science education.

This book highlights models for promoting interdisciplinary thinking and an appreciation for interdisciplinary understanding among students in STEM-related fields. Students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics often perceive that courses in their major are not related to the general education liberal arts courses required for their degrees. This separation prevents the transfer of skills between their general education courses and their degree pursuits. The false dichotomy is particularly important because solving the daunting challenges of the twenty-first century—such as drug-resistant bacteria, scarcity of natural resources, and climate change—requires global citizens armed with robust, complex abilities who can integrate interdisciplinary concepts with bold technologies. Contributors to this book explore ways in which this dichotomy can be overcome.