STEAM Designed and Enacted: Understanding the Process of Design and Implementation of STEAM Curriculum in an Elementary School

An attempt to evaluate STEAM project-based instruction from a school mathematics perspective

“…Concerning problem-centred learning, research has shown that STE(A)M projects are hardly contextualised in real life (Potari et al, 2016;Quigley et al, 2020a). Most proposals have no meaning outside school, because of the difficulty of being set in real world contexts (Domènech-Casal et al, 2019).…”

“…Macías et al claimed that the final product cannot be understood as the only objective and all disciplines should be similarly approached during implementation. To facilitate instruction endorsing formative assessment and high cognitive demand for all, Berardi and Corica (2021) and Quigley et al (2020a) proposed involving students in real contexts meaningful to them. The mathematics to be applied in such contexts may be difficult but teachers could simplify it (Izaguirre et al, 2020;Macías et al, 2020).…”

“…There seems to be no agreement on the role teachers and students should adopt during the STE(A)M project implementation. Some authors suggest that projects should be led by students, especially during the inquiry phase, as they are more likely to promote processes such as examining, questioning, and hypothesising (Quigley et al, 2020a). Contrarily, others claim that teachers must guide the learning process because students are able to pose only those questions that emerge naturally in their minds (Berardi & Corica, 2021).…”

An SSI-Based STEAM Approach to Developing Science Programs

“…The Gaps in STEAM Studies have shown that contextualizing science concepts in authentic realworld scenarios enables students to see the relevance and meaningfulness of science to their lives (French, 2019;Kim & Song, 2013). This is an aspect that current STEAM practices are struggling to achieve authentically because the real-world problems are often chosen simply to meet the outcomes set for the curriculum (Quigley et al, 2020). These types of choices may result in disregard of students' social and cultural contexts, thus making it difficult for them to perceive the connection that science or real-world problems have to their daily lives (Quigley et al, 2020).…”

“…The lack of authenticity in STEAM and disconnections between students' science learning and their everyday lives has been found to have negative effects on students' conceptual understanding, skills, values, and attitudes and hence on their scientific literacy (Harker-Schuch & Bugge-Henriksen, 2013;Quigley et al, 2020). This is a major concern because the scientific performance data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) illustrate that scientific literacy has been steadily declining over the last few years (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2021).…”