RESEARCH ARTICLE Adv. Sci. Lett. 12, 1936–6612, 2016
4225
Copyright © 2015 American Scientific Publishers Advanced Science Letters
All rights reserved Vol. 12
Printed in the United States of America
A Meta-Analysis on Effective Strategies for
Integrated STEM Education
Norazla Mustafa
1,2
, Zaleha Ismail
1,2
, Zaidatun Tasir
1,2
, Mohd Nihra Haruzuan Mohamad Said
1,2
1
Department of Sciences, Mathematics and Creative Multimedia, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310, Johor Bahru, Malaysia
2
Faculty of Education, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
81310, Johor Bahru, Malaysia
STEM education reform plays a critical role in modern education for the country to keep abreast of being competitive in global economy. For a long
time, STEM disciplines have been in silos, rendering the students unable to connect learned knowledge with real life problems. The emergence of
integrated STEM education in some institutions suggests that, this approach makes students better problem solvers and logical thinkers. This paper
provided an overview of what teaching strategies dominate in the implementation of integrated STEM education. The research methodology was
based on a review of relevant literature search strategy through ERIC, online databases and journals such as Science Direct, Wiley Online Library,
Taylor & Francis Online, SpringerLink, IEEE Xplore Digital Library, JSTOR and Journal of STEM Education. The keywords used in the search
included integration strategies, science and technology, teaching and learning STEM, STEM in primary school, STEM in secondary school and
STEM in higher education. The results of this meta-analysis revealed that, a project-based learning approach is the dominant strategy in STEM
education implementation as this method improves the students’ skills and their capability to compete with others in the highly knowledge-based
society. Findings from this review will lead educators who are new to STEM education to investigate further on how project-based learning could be
effectively implemented in their teaching.
Keywords: Integration strategies; Science and technology; Teaching and learning STEM; STEM in schools; STEM in higher education
Keywords: Theorem Proving, Parallel Algoritm, Extension Rule.
1. INTRODUCTION
STEM is an interdisciplinary area which consists of
four-discipline namely science, technology, engineering
and mathematics
27,28
. National Science Foundation (NSF)
had introduced the acronym of STEM, which definitions
vary from one source to another. Many scholars agreed
for STEM education to identified as separate subjects
5,9
.
STEM should be understood as an integrative approach
into the educational curriculum that connects four
different subjects into one
30,41
. Previous empirical studies
showed that the integrated STEM learning has the
potential to produce competitive future workforce with
the 21
st
century skills
1,6
and positive impacts towards
students’ interest
17,42,43
; and achievement
42,43
. However,
STEM faced huge challenges to strengthen the
effectiveness of its implementation in education
43,35
.
*
Email Address: norazla182@gmail.com
STEM educations develop problem-solving skills,
promote student-centered learning, and cultivate higher
order thinking skills
11, 21,34,38
. It also refers to ‘‘Research
indicates that using an interdisciplinary or integrated
curriculum provides opportunities for more relevant, less
fragmented, and more stimulating experiences for
learners’’
14
. Therefore, the integrated of STEM education
can be defined as incorporating the theory and practices
of science and mathematics education into technology
and engineering education
36
. Integrated STEM education
can be complimented by prevailing teaching and learning
approaches such as project-based, problem-based,
inquiry-based and theme-based learning
1
.
Although, there are a lot of articles on STEM
education such as those by
2,11,35,37,44
, there is a limited
number of researches focusing on specific strategies of
integrated STEM education
7,13,40,45,46,47
. In spite of many
efforts put in to strengthen STEM education, there are