STEM education was a systematic teaching and/or learning process in the STEM fields and a positive correlation existed between STEM education, and the economic prosperity and power of a nation in the globalized world. In recent years, rising concerns have emerged about American STEM education. Many stakeholders wondered that whether the nation has enough well-qualified STEM students, teachers and workforce to maintain its current competitive edge. This study sought to answer those questions, presenting a unique view about the concerns. This study, besides, summarized selected major legislation which affected STEM Education in the United States. The results of the study showed that American students in elementary and secondary schools have relatively mediocre scores compared with their international peers (especially Asians), although they performed better than earlier American cohorts in science and mathematics. The quality of STEM teachers also led to concerns. The lowest certification rate of teachers was found in science and mathematics, and approximately half of the teachers did not have a degree in the subject that they teach. Lastly, this study revealed that students should learn the requisite new patterns of language and expression only through opportunity for and engagement in STEM disciplinary practices.

Elementary students’ early development of embedding and disembedding is complex and paves the way for later STEM learning. The purpose of this study was to clarify the factors that support students’ embedding (i.e., overlapping shapes to form a new shape) and disembedding (i.e., identifying discrete shapes within another shape) through the use of filled shapes as opposed to shape frames. We recruited 26 Grade 1 students (~6–7 years old) and 23 Grade 3 students (~8–9 years old), asked them to work on two layered puzzle designs from the Color Code puzzle game, and interviewed them about their thinking processes. The first graders had higher success rates at fixing and embedding the tiles correctly, and students at both grade levels improved on the three-tile design when encountering it a second time about two months later. The four-tile design was more difficult, but students improved if they could identify a correct sub-structure of the design. Successful students used a combination of pictorial shape strategies and schematic location strategies, systematically testing tiles and checking how they could be embedded. The results suggest that helping students focus on sub-structures can promote their effective embedding.

One of the most important goals of education is to ensure the quality of teaching and learning. Sense of teacher's self-efficacy affects the quality throughout the contribution to all stakeholders in educational process. The right of religious education is one of the essential rights in the world. Moreover, it has positive effect on the society by helping to improve social relationship. Therefore, teacher self-efficacy belief based on religious groups is critical for stakeholders in religious education as well as other fields. The purpose of this study is to construct an instrument to measure teachers' sense of self-efficacy related to teaching compulsory K-12 theology courses. The result of the study indicates that the teacher self-efficacy scale towards religious groups is valid and reliable instrument. The instrument is going to be useful to look to peaceful future with confidence.

We analyzed students' responses to a series of broken ruler measurement tasks in the form of incorrect worked examples. The measurement tasks challenged students' initial conceptions of where the measurement starts and how to determine the overall length. Brief Report Typical difficulties with measuring include aligning the object with the ruler at one instead of at zero, aligning the object at the ruler's edge, or incorrectly identifying the number at the end point of the object as the length regardless of where the object's beginning point is aligned with the ruler (Clements, 1999; Drake, 2014; Lehrer et al., 1998). Broken ruler tasks are often used to highlight where students are on the measurement trajectory, but when presented as worked examples, can also help them confront their confusions. An orientation toward focusing on the trajectory of students' learning is prevalent in the learning through activity approach (Simon et al., 2010). Key to such approaches is a focus on choosing task sequences that could promote reflective abstraction (Simon et al., 2010; Piaget, 1960). The tasks are meant to expose students to potential inconsistencies in their thinking, help them make sense of them, and advance their thinking to resolve the inconsistencies (Kamii, 2006). As part of a larger study, 32 first-graders and 37 third-graders responded to a series of measurement tasks in the form of incorrect worked examples. We chose measurement problems to challenge students' initial conceptions about where a measurement starts and how to determine the overall length. We provided students with a worked example of an incorrectly solved broken ruler task for the students to "debug." The task had only one erroneous component: the length measurement of the item. We created follow-up questions (which we presented during the post-test) showing a screwdriver placed on a ruler in different places, based on their responses to the initial task. To determine how their continuous measuring ideas related to their discrete measurement ideas, we included an example of a student measuring with blocks. The students associated the concept of the beginning point to start measuring with zero, one, and edge. This study tells what first and third graders know about measurements when working a sequence of measurement tasks on paper and it provides useful insight into their conceptions of measurements.

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