STEM Education in Asia Pacific: Challenges and Development
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EDITORIAL
STEM Education in Asia Pacific: Challenges and Development Min-Hsien Lee1,4 • Ching Sing Chai2 • Huang-Yao Hong3
Ó De La Salle University 2018
Introduction
Current Situation in the Asian Context
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education has been viewed as foundational to economic growth by many countries in the world, and has thus received continuous attention from ministries of education. The existing reviews (Brown 2012; Mizell and Brown 2016) in the United States indicate that the research in STEM is growing, with integrative STEM constituting the largest in terms of subject matter investigated. K-12 students are also the most frequently researched student group. These reviews indicate that the research conducted so far has employed an equal spread of mixed, qualitative, and quantitative research. To gain further insights into the current emphasis on STEM education, a search on the Web of Science using the search term (‘‘science technology engineering mathematics’’ OR ‘‘STEM’’) was conducted on September 19, 2018. The search was limited to educational research. For the last 5 years (2013–2017), there are 662 published articles with an increasing trend. Within these 662 articles, we identified several important trends.
First, the U.S.-based research accounted for two-thirds (65%) of the studies, while Asian countries (China, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.) accounted for only around 8.5% of the articles. Second, issues related with equity account for almost 29% (N = 197) of the articles, while only around 3% (N = 19) employ ‘‘engineering design’’ as the pedagogical anchor. This trend is not quite parallel with Mizell and Brown’s (2016) report, which is a U.S.-based one. In comparison to the myriad studies labeled as STEM-focused but in fact dealing only with a single subject (usually science learning), only those studies involving engineering design which are real-world oriented and inherently multidisciplinary deal with real STEM problems. Fortunately, engineering is increasingly becoming a focus, with the number of studies growing from only one in 2013 to eight in 2017. In the Asian context, there is only one study that employs engineering design as its pedagogical anchor (Lou et al. 2017), indicating the importance of engineering design as an emerging area of research. Third, there is an obvious gap in research pertaining to teacher preparation and professional development (Al Salami et al. 2017; Cavlazoglu and Stuessy 2017). Teachers play a significant role in equipping students with relevant STEM knowledge and shaping their choice of STEM career. Lee et al. (2015) longitudinal study employing logistic regression analyses of students’ choice of a STEM career indicated that teachers’ expectations of students are particularly influential. While the lack of focused study on teacher professional development to foster STEM learning warrants further investigation, the situation seems unsurprising. If it is already challenging for a teacher to master the pedagogical
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