Simon Marginson

Russell Tytler

Brigid Freeman

Across the world STEM (learning and work in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) has taken central importance in education and the economy in a way that few other disciplines have. STEM competence has become seen as key to higher productivity, technological adaptation and research-based innovation. No area of educational provision has a greater current importance than the STEM disciplines yet there is a surprising dearth of comprehensive and world-wide information about STEM policy, participation, programs and practice. The Age of STEM is a state of the art survey of the global trends and major country initiatives in STEM. It gives an international overview of issues such as: STEM strategy and coordination curricula, teaching and assessment women in STEM indigenous students research training STEM in the graduate labour markets STEM breadth and STEM depth The individual chapters give comparative international analysis as well as a global overview, particularly focusing on the growing number of policies and practices in mobilising and developing talent in the STEM fields. The book will be of particular interest to anyone involved in educational policy, those in education management and leaders in both schooling and tertiary education. It will have a wider resonance among practitioners in the STEM disciplines, particularly at university level, and for those interested in contemporary public policy.

Educational policy and practice across the world in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

The Age of STEM

Peta J. White

Joseph Paul Ferguson

John Cripps Clark

The COVID-19 pandemic has likely changed the mathematics, health and environmental education research landscape in profound and long-lasting ways. As such, more than ever, there is a need to creatively and critically think about how we design research and for what purposes. This necessitates a considered and robust discussion about educational research theory, method, and methodology to ensure that our research continues to impact practice in valuable ways. This book maps out some of these key challenges and opportunities as we collectively enter a post-COVID-19 world in which method and methodology need to be appreciated as much as research findings. Topics explored here range from big-picture issues in STEM Education research, through perspectives on design-based research, to questions of analysis, complexity, the Delphi method, and ethical dilemmas.

Methodological Approaches to STEM Education Research Volume 2

Vaughan Prain

Bruce Waldrip

Peter Hubber

Constructing Representations to Learn in Science Current research into student learning in science has shifted attention from the traditional cognitivist perspectives of conceptual change to socio-cultural and semiotic perspectives that characterize learning in terms of induction into disciplinary literacy practices. This book builds on recent interest in the role of representations in learning to argue for a pedagogical practice based on students actively generating and exploring representations. The book describes a sustained inquiry in which the authors worked with primary and secondary teachers of science, on key topics identified as problematic in the research literature. Data from classroom video, teacher interviews and student artifacts were used to develop and validate a set of pedagogical principles and explore student learning and teacher change issues. The authors argue the theoretical and practical case for a representational focus. The pedagogical approach is illustrated and explored in terms of the role of representation to support quality student learning in science. Separate chapters address the implications of this perspective and practice for structuring sequences around different concepts, reasoning and inquiry in science, models and model based reasoning, the nature of concepts and learning, teacher change, and assessment. The authors argue that this representational focus leads to significantly enhanced student learning, and has the effect of offering new and productive perspectives and approaches for a number of contemporary strands of thinking in science education including conceptual change, inquiry, scientific literacy, and a focus on the epistemic nature of science.

Constructing Representations to Learn in Science

Russell Tytler

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