Importance of STEM Foundational Thinking Concepts in Education

  STEM foundational thinking is important for integrating content areas in a transdisciplinary approach to public education.  The foundational thinking skills that students learn through STEM education will help them throughout their education careers and beyond.  Specifically in the Elementary grade levels, Elementary-school students are most likely to gain STEM foundational thinking when they have opportunities to engage in in-depth investigations of phenomena around them worthy of their knowledge and understanding (Katz & Chard, 2000). ...

What is STEM Education?

As long as there has been education, from the ancient Egyptians’ library built by Ashurbanipal, the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (685-627 BCE), to Confucius during the Zhou Dynasty (551-479 BCE), to Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BCE), Socrates (c. 470-399 BCE), and Aristotle (c. 384-322 BCE), there has been debate about how it should be organized, managed, who it should be for, and how knowledge should be disseminated to people (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2011).  Educators and critics have...

STEM Identities

Research indicates that very few students view themselves as STEM learners when investigating a question or problem in their community.  Whereas previous research indicates a lack of diversity in STEM education and careers and specific schools structures that support successful STEM integration, there is a greater need to research what elementary school structures support students of color in STEM curricular areas.  When researching mathematics education in working class Latina/o communities, Marta Civil (2014) feels that...