STEM education for the twenty-first century: A New Zealand perspective

Abstract

The Australasian Journal of TechnologyEducation is a peer refereed journal, and provides a forum for scholarly discussion on topics relating to technology education. Submissions are welcomed relating to the primary, secondary and higher education sectors, initial teacher education and continuous professional development, and general research about Technology Education. Contributions to the on-going research debate are encouraged from any country. The expectation is that the Journal will publish articles at the leading edge of development of the subject area. The Journal seeks to publish• reports of research, • articles based on action research by practitioners, • literature reviews, and • book reviews.Publisher: The Technology, Environmental, Mathematics and Science (TEMS) Education Research Centre, which is part of the Faculty of Education, The University of Waikato, publishes the journal. Contact details:The Editor, AJTE, pjohn.williams@curtin.edu.au Cover Design: Roger JoyceThis journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. ISSN: 2382-2007

STEM Education in New Zealand at the Senior Secondary Level: Cross-Curricula Course Design and Assessment for NCEA

“…This paper builds on previous work (Granshaw, 2016) that discussed the nature of STEM education (see below) and how it might fit within the structure of the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007). It extends this earlier work with the main objective of evaluating the current range of Technology assessment standards within the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) to judge their potential fit for NCEA-related STEM courses that are integrative in design.…”

“…As mentioned, it is unrealistic to expect individual teachers to engage with this breadth of subject content knowledge at a secondary level. As noted by Granshaw (2016), an integrative-STEM course is likely to involve co-operative design and teaching from two or more teachers in order to span the range of content and skills being addressed; contributing teachers need to buy-in to the purpose and rationale of the course. Co-operative teaching practices are also important for helping teachers new to cross-curricular design to develop a sense of self-efficacy for undertaking the design and teaching involved.…”

“…The term STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education describes a group of key subjects that are considered to be important if a nation is to compete in a global economic and scientific world (Granshaw, 2016). The notion of integrative-STEM education is based on an integration or interaction (Williams, 2011) of subject content knowledge where emphasis is placed on students drawing together knowledge from science, engineering, technology and mathematics, in order to solve design problems.…”

STEM Education in the New Zealand Setting: A Case-Study of STEM in a Year 7/8 Classroom

“…For the purposes of my study, I adopted an interdisciplinary approach focused on the integration of the four disciplines. That is, I viewed the disciplines as interlinked and interrelated learning areas (Granshaw, 2016), which allowed me to use their innate linkages to support student learning in a realworld context. This said, it is recognised that it can be challenging for teachers to plan and implement integrated STEM units which rely on their knowledge of each of the four STEM disciplines and their Teachers and Curriculum, Volume 21, Special Issue: Quality STEM Education, 2021 capacity to integrate this (Banilower et al, 2018).…”

“…The current New Zealand Curriculum [NZC] (Ministry of Education, 2007) does not include specific mention of engineering or STEM. However, ideas and practices associated with engineering can be seen as falling within the umbrella of Technology Education as this is defined in the NZC (Granshaw, 2016). Within the 2017 revision, technology education is conceptualised as encompassing five technological areas: computational thinking, designing and developing digital outcomes, designing and developing material outcomes, designing and developing processed outcomes, and design and visual communication (Ministry of Education, 2018).…”