Kelley and Knowles (2016) also reported on how “educational researchers indicate that teachers struggle to make connections across the STEM disciplines” (p. 1). This appears to be the heart of the issue so it is here that we make our final recommendations, where we affirm what Lyons (2022) stated regarding the objectives and transdisciplinary nature of STEM as follows:
Having a Scope and sequence for primary STEM education is a positive step forward but such knowledge is best seen as provisional. To make a meaningful STEM unit of work, it must be conceptual and not merely factual or procedural. Factual and procedural learning is still important but STEM education is an opportunity to go deeply into conceptual topics. Our final recommendation is that exploring carefully chosen conceptual topics can help teachers and students to make important connections and enable them to become competent and functional in an increasingly complex world.
In addition to The 28 STEM units, a new unit on Circles and rotation as scaffolds for STEM education is available here. This units draws on some existing content from other units and combines it around the affordances of circles and rotation.
The SILO Project is a longitudinal study, so the following answers to the three research questions are best seen as provisional because these answers can be updated to reflect best practice in STEM education as the project continues to evolve.
1/ What might an effective STEM extension program for K-6 students look like?
This is an open-ended question, but we propose that an effective STEM extension program could look like the content and structure of The SILO Project website (https://silo.edu.au/), as this was whole reason for building it. This also demonstrates Provisional Multimodal Research in action because The SILO website shows exactly what an effective STEM extension program might look like, but the word ‘might’ implies that it could look very different depending on the context of other schools in other places.
2/ Which mathematics concepts can we engage students to explore by the
end of Year 6?
All schools have curriculum documents which
inform what is taught across the various years. The answer to this
question is then more about the big STEM ideas and these are often linked
to mathematics. In keeping with Bruner's (1960) spiral curriculum which
advocated for the early introduction of concepts, these mathematics
concepts are as follows:
3/ How can the co-design of learning sequences and activities between
teachers and researchers be effectively undertaken to improve the
quality and usability of project findings and recommendations?
Research projects involving classroom teachers often require additional time commitments for planning, interviews, and other methods for capturing the perspectives of participants. Of course, these are all valid but one of the scarcest resources which teachers have is time, which is why The SILO Project has functioned by working within the classroom without additional time commitments. The chief investigator always has plans for the various SILO sessions but feedback from teachers is usually provided 'in situ', meaning in place or on site, during the one-hour classroom visits. The chief investigator then functions as a scribe, making required changes to the various web pages later that evening. The chief investigator has also adopted the practice of sending an email summarising the SILO session later that afternoon as a record of the content, learning intentions, and a brief reflection about what worked and any changes which might be beneficial. Of the three answers, this is perhaps the one which is the most firmly established, as it works within current timetables and structures with minimal disruption. Usability is also enhanced by the grassroots approach of trialling the various activities in classrooms.
The chief investigator for The SILO Project is Associate Professor Brendan Jacobs, Head of Department STEM Education, University of New England. The SILO Project thrives on incremental improvement so constructive feedback is greatly appreciated. Please contact Brendan via email at bjacobs7@une.edu.au to share your thoughts and recommendations.
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License