Perspective: STEM Education Needs a Major Overhaul

By Robert Tinker

Science education could be so much better if only we implemented it based on what we know about teaching and learning. Decades of research, pilot studies, and innovations have conclusively demonstrated how science education could be improved. We should also include changes in the disciplines and newly discovered science content, and most importantly, we should exploit the many opportunities that technology provides to fundamentally change what is taught and how students learn. These changes could result in huge advances in student understanding.

There is wide agreement that something should be done about science, mathematics, and engineering education. Increasingly, industry is high-tech, jobs demand technological savvy, civic decisions are based on models and statistics, and personal health requires medical expertise. Societies that implement a 21st century science education will flourish while those that cling to antiquated models will be left behind. This was recognized recently in a flood of passionate and reasoned calls for improvements in science education from business leaders, academia, futurists, commentators, and even the military. Clarity about what to do, however, has been lacking. Most plans involve some combination of higher standards, harder tests, more required courses, more AP courses, better teachers, higher pay, or smaller schools. These changes simply result in more of the same old instructional practices. They fail to support needed change in what is taught, how it is taught, and how it is assessed.

A new, comprehensive and coherent curriculum is needed from kindergarten through the first years of college in all STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) that focuses on fewer and deeper concepts taught conceptually, coherently, and in meaningful contexts. These core concepts can provide touchstones around which a profusion of math, science, and engineering topics can be organized in a far more interdisciplinary way.

A good place to start a reform effort is the secondary STEM curriculum. Success at the secondary level would have a profound effect on both elementary and college education. Such a radical design for STEM education reform must be based on the following principles:

• Research Based. There is a growing consensus on how to teach STEM subjects. Students need to be actively engaged in thinking critically about key topics, so that they examine their own ideas and build associations.
• Unified. Mathematics, engineering, and the sciences should be linked as much as possible. An integrated math-science sequence should take advantage of a spiral curriculum. Technology and engineering, usually orphaned, should be woven throughout these courses.
• Conceptual. There should be far less emphasis on facts and algorithms, and far more on core concepts. For instance, the calculus concepts of derivatives and integrals would be covered in science and engineering contexts without focusing on their proofs or calculation.
• Technology Enhanced. A reformed STEM education would exploit many advantages of current technology for experimentation, modeling, collaboration, and resource acquisition.
• Standards Compliant. STEM reform can adhere to the national standards and go far beyond them in many cases by emphasizing fundamental concepts and featuring an emphasis on inquiry, applied math, and engineering found in the standards.
• Teacher Friendly. Teachers should have extensive support for teaching the new content and adopting new instructional techniques. The technology should give teachers detailed and timely feedback about student learning so they can adjust instruction.

This vision will be difficult to achieve. Few schools have the resources and flexibility to implement these recommendations. Not all the needed curriculum pieces currently exist, and few have been subjected to classroom testing. And teachers will be required to learn new content and better instructional strategies. Still, this vision cannot be dismissed simply because of the challenges to its implementation. We hope adventurous educators, schools, and institutions can agree on an agenda for comprehensive reform of STEM education, along these lines.

Robert Tinker (bob@concord.org) is President of the Concord Consortium.