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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
The 21st Century STEM Reasoning
Author(s)
Robert Mayes, Bryon Gallant
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DOI:10.17265/2161-6248/2018.02.002
Affiliation(s)
Georgia Southern University, State of Georgia, USA
ABSTRACT
The integration of Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics (STEM) programs within the educational
framework and the creation of STEM-designated schools and academic/career pathways
represent a national trend meant to prepare students for the demands of the 21st
century while addressing future workforce needs. Often, however, the STEM disciplines
are taught within silos independent of each other. Students miss the opportunity
to participate in the interrelationship among the STEM disciplines, resulting in missing opportunities to build
critical reasoning skills. The Real STEM Project focuses on the development of interdisciplinary
STEM within the school and community. Interdisciplinary STEM is characterized by
sustained professional development that is job-embedded and competency-based, and
on the development of student reasoning abilities across contexts. To accomplish
this, interdisciplinary STEM should strive to be inclusive when it comes to the
multiple STEM disciplines, embrace authentic teaching strategies that are based
on real-world problem-solving through hands-on student engagement, and structured
around the three Ps: project-based, place-based, and problem-based. To assist
in developing an interdisciplinary STEM program, this article concludes with a focus
on five primary reasoning modalities that best capture the spirit of interdisciplinary
STEM: complex systems reasoning,
science model-based reasoning, technology computational reasoning, engineering design-based
reasoning, and quantitative reasoning.
KEYWORDS
interdisciplinary STEM, reasoning, authentic teaching, expert collaboration
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