Assessing chemistry teachers’ needs and expectations from integrated STEM education professional developments

Abstract

Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education has gained popularity worldwide. With the twenty-first century's different economic, political, and societal needs, nations intend to train citizens as better problem solvers. The current integrated STEM movement has influenced science curriculum documents and science teaching and learning to address those issues. To attain the goals of recent reform, teachers' understanding of the essential characteristics of integrated STEM education and learning implementation of the STEM activities with engineering design challenges are required. The related literature has stated that teachers' voices should be heard to address their needs through professional development (PD). In light of that point, in this needs assessment study, we intended to determine in-service chemistry teachers' expectations from and needs for implementing integrated STEM education. Data were collected from 112 chemistry teachers via open-ended questions. Results showed that most of the teachers stated that they expect to experience integrated STEM activities with their active participation through PDs. Additionally, the participants highlighted their expectations from a PD design to learn what integrated STEM education is and its essential features. Learning how to integrate STEM activities into lessons, developing integrated STEM lesson plans, and interdisciplinary chemistry teaching were other participants' expectations. Examples of participants' needs were learning implementation of integrated STEM education, integrating chemistry with STEM disciplines, finding chemistry-based STEM activities, and learning engineering design process and product. In order to reach PDs' goals set, first of all, teachers' needs for and expectations from the PDs should be determined regarding the STEM approach and then the PDs in which the teachers take a role as active participants should be organized.

Keywords

• integrated STEM education
• needs assessment
• professional development
• in-service teachers
• STEM training