Aspects of STEM Education

The aspects of STEM that my cohort studied this week were assessment, integrative STEM, increasing community involvement, policy and funding in STEM education, society and STEM learning, students’ thinking and misconceptions, STEM workforce, literacy, and STEAM.  The only one of these topics that I can relate to the school that I work at is assessment, integrative STEM, students’ thinking and misconceptions, and literacy.

• I have definitely seen assessments in my job setting daily. Students complete an exit ticket on most days, take a quiz every Friday, and have a test every few weeks. The assessments focus on whether or not students understand the material.
• Integrative STEM ties STEM into other subjects including English, Spanish, art, etc.  The most I saw of this was students reading a few informational pages every week that summarizes what we learned in the previous week. I think it definitely helps reinforce their learning of the material and helps develop their biology literacy.
• When grading the quizzes from last Friday, I realized that students didn’t know what a mole is. I had just assumed that this was something they learned in middle school, and I failed to pre-assess students’ thinking and misconceptions about the topic. Or in this case, I failed to assess their actual knowledge of that topic. As a result, many students got stumbled on that mysterious word and it prevented them to focus on the actual purpose of the question.

I have also noticed some STEM activities. Last week, students completed an egg lab to learn tonicity. Boiled eggs were placed in corn syrup (hypertonic to the egg), distilled water (hypotonic to the egg), and vinegar (isotonic to the egg). Students then observed the changes of the mass and circumference of the egg and explained why this happens using scientific terms in a discussion. There has also been a few other labs that students completed in the previous weeks. STEM activities, such as labs and writing lab reports, help students solidify their understanding of the topic and see how the concepts learned in class relate to real life.

Visualization of what happens to an egg when it is placed in various solutions. Image retrieved from http://mccleskeyms.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452555669e201bb07bd73c5970d-pi

On average, there has been the same level of understanding of STEM for all four of my classes. There aren’t subpopulations at the school I teach at; all students are of the same demographics and economic status. Although all my classes on average have the same level of understanding, I think there can be some improvement with how they are performing. The public high school I work predominantly teaches the students using worksheets. I think this can be complicated and confusing, especially if students lose one of their worksheet packets. I think the students would benefit better from taking notes in one designated notebook. Also, the school predominantly uses questions on the worksheets to get the students to think of the answers. I know that problem-based learning and inquiry-based learning can be helpful to student engagement and understanding, but I think it should be used in balance. I think there’s a time and a place for students to try to figure out how a scientific concept works using their common sense and educational guesses, but there should also be time for teachers to just lecture certain topics so students fully understand them.