Do you want to improve STEM education? This is how

Key points:

Federal agencies, states and school districts should develop robust methods to expand the use of promising innovations that can improve STEM education from preschool through high school, according to a study. new report ordered by Congress of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

For several decades, the federal government has allocated resources to strengthen science, technology, engineering and mathematics education, the report notes. This has led to the development of a rich variety of educational innovations (programs, practices, models and technologies) to support teaching and learning within the STEM disciplines.

“Overall, investments in innovations in STEM education have led to many promising programs,” said Christine Massey, chair of the committee that wrote the report and principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles. “However, only a limited number of students routinely experience the benefits of many of these efforts. “We need to activate and expand the best of what has been discovered and created.”

The report includes a compendium of more than 50 successful evidence-based educational innovations in the U.S. The programs span diverse audiences, topics and approaches, ranging from a program to help preschool students develop informal mathematics knowledge and skills to a portal that educators can use to access educational materials on climate and energy topics, to a program that helps middle and high school students learn to code by creating original music remixes.

Innovations in the compendium vary in their success in scaling up to reach larger numbers of students in different educational contexts, according to the report. Innovations seem more likely to grow if they have certain key characteristics; for example, whether they have a strong and clearly articulated core program with room to adapt to different contexts and learners, and whether they include professional learning to develop the capabilities of individuals or organisations. to implement innovation.

The report also identifies factors that may limit the ability of innovations to scale. For example, they may be developed in ways that do not take into account variation between educational contexts; Essentially, there is a disconnection between the context where the innovation was developed and the contexts where it would need to be implemented. Collaboration across multiple sites and iterative design cycles over time may be a model for addressing this issue, according to the report.

Systemic change needed to scale innovations

It is not clear that bringing together a series of discrete, innovative programs will result in significant improvements in student outcomes, the report says. To achieve this will likely require more robust systemic change across the education system.

To that end, the report recommends steps that agencies and leaders at all levels of the U.S. education system should take to build the system's capacity to facilitate more effective scaling up of innovations. Actions are needed to develop the capacity of educators to implement innovations; improve research infrastructure to develop innovations that are scalable and sustainable; develop methods to support systemic and continuous improvement; and understand how to monitor progress.

Among the committee's specific recommendations:

• The National Science Foundation should develop a new generation of systemic initiatives for K-12 STEM education with the goal of developing infrastructure, capacity, and expertise to harvest promising evidence-based innovations, prepare them for broader implementation in new settings. and fund backbone organizations to organize the resources and support systems necessary to carry out implementations in schools.
• The U.S. Department of Education should allocate funding for teacher learning and professional development in all STEM disciplines, including science, technology, engineering, mathematics, computer science, and other emerging STEM-focused subjects such as data science.
• School and district leaders must adopt a framework of continuous improvement, emphasizing iterative evaluation and refinement of strategies to address the evolving educational landscape. This involves a cycle of planning, implementation, evaluation and adjustment, involving relevant people to ensure continued relevance.
• To understand the implementation and scaling of STEM educational innovations from pre-kindergarten to grade 12, state and district partners must develop data systems that capture information about opportunities to learn, including instructional time, resource allocation, and funding. , access and enrollment in such innovations and advancements toward a strong and highly qualified STEM teaching workforce.
• Leaders of local and regional K-12 systems should work to strengthen learning opportunities in STEM education for key actors in the STEM education learning ecosystem (e.g., teachers, school/district leaders, school boards, teacher educators, professional development providers, colleges and universities, museums, nonprofits, families) with an emphasis on building relational connections across communities and sharing knowledge.

The study, carried out by the PreK-12 STEM Education Innovations Committeewas sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, engineering, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter for the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.

This press release originally appeared online.

eSchool Media staff covers educational technology in all its aspects, from legislation and litigation to best practices, lessons learned and new products. First published in March 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information needed to help K-20 decision makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and universities. and achieve their educational goals.

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