STEM Road Map 2.0

A Framework for Integrated STEM Education in the Innovation Age

Carla C. Johnson, Erin E. Peters-Burton, Tamara J. Moore, Carla C. Johnson, Erin E. Peters-Burton, Tamara J. Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000351989
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

Featuring a team of over thirty STEM education professionals from across the United States, the updated and revised edition of this landmark book provides an integrated STEM curriculum encompassing the entire K-12 spectrum, with complete grade-level learning based on a spiraled approach to building conceptual understanding.

Taking into account the last five years of evolution in STEM education, the second edition includes an increased focus on computer science, computational thinking, mathematics, and the arts, as well as cultural relevance and addressing the needs of diverse learners and underrepresented students. Divided into three main parts – Conceptualizing STEM, STEM Curriculum Maps, and Building Capacity for STEM – each section is designed to build common understandings of integrated STEM, provide rich curriculum maps for implementing integrated STEM at the classroom level, and offer supports to enable systemic transformation to an integrated STEM approach.

Written for teachers, policymakers, and administrators, this second edition is fully updated to account for the needs of K-12 learners in the innovation age. STEM Road Map 2.0 enables educators to implement integrated STEM learning into their classroom without the need for extensive resources, empowering educators and supporting students.

Part I
Conceptualizing STEM

1 The Need for a STEM Road Map

Carla C. Johnson, Tamara J. Moore, Erin E. Peters-Burton, and Selcen S. Guzey

Introduction

Since the publication of the first STEM Road Map book in 2015, there have been considerable changes in the world and within the United States overall. One constant in the system has been the pervasive need for improving STEM education to meet the needs of students in their future lives – regardless of career choice – and to grow a talent base for future innovation in STEM and non-STEM fields. Policy makers and educational leaders continue to advocate that the key to future prosperity of the United States is improving STEM teaching and learning opportunities for our children (Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century, 2007; Committee on STEM Education of the National Science and Technology Council, 2018; Carnevale, Smith, & Melton, 2011; Dickman, Schabe, Schmidt, & Henken, 2009). This is driven by two distinct realities: current jobs as well as the jobs of the future are integrally STEM-driven and the foundation of STEM knowledge students receive in K-12 has been directly linked to the prosperity of our country. Our reality is that there are still formidable challenges for the United States in STEM education. In 2020, students in the United States continue to score below the international average in mathematics. Science performance is only average compared to our global peers (National Science Board, 2018). Further, students in the United States are not adequately prepared for success in STEM in college (ACT2), as access to equitable STEM education opportunities still remains a great challenge.

The need for STEM talent has continued to grow and is projected to increase nearly 10% from 2014 to 2024, and individuals working in STEM fields earned nearly 30% more than non-STEM counterparts in 2015 (United States Department of Commerce, 2017). Student mastery of STEM disciplines in K-12 schools is directly connected to success in college as well as economic growth and development, national security, and global competitiveness (Business Roundtable, 2008; Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, 2007; Committee on STEM Education of the National Science and Technology Council, 2018).

There have been several reports that have provided strategies for preparing our children for the STEM-wave of change. In 2018, the Committee on STEM Education of the National Science and Technology Council released Charting a Course for Success: America’s Strategy for STEM Education which engaged an unprecedented group of stakeholders from governmental agencies, higher education, K-12 education, and informal education agencies. For all intents and purposes, this “federal STEM strategic plan” provided a five-year vision for moving the United States into a future “where Americans will have lifelong access to high-quality STEM education and the U.S. will be a global leader in STEM literacy, innovation, and employment” (National Science and Technology Council, p. v.). There are three goals of the plan, which include focus on STEM literacy (including computational thinking and digital literacy), increasing diversity and access in STEM, and preparing individuals for success in STEM careers.

This book, STEM Road Map 2.0, leverages the foundational work in integrated STEM education that was developed and presented in the first edition and further expands the thinking and strategies to align with the goals of the new plan. Additionally, as suggested in the Carnegie Foundation report (2009), the STEM Road Map provides an innovative curriculum design for delivering STEM learning more effectively across the continuum of K-12 schooling. The STEM Road Map project started as an ambitious undertaking by 25 leaders in STEM education from the various STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) as well as English/Language Arts and stakeholders from the realm of educational policy and reform. The focus of the effort was to address the need for innovative, integrated, problem, and project-based, high-quality curriculum for K-12 that would begin to address the prevalent issues within our educational system and provide teachers with a tool that would enable them to teach the Common Core (mathematics and English/language arts) along with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) while infusing the 21st Century Skills Framework (www.p21.org) in a real-world, meaningful way. An integrated STEM approach is necessary for addressing global and local challenges as well as for success in careers of today and those anticipated in the future. Roehrig, Moore, Wang, and Park (2012) argued that our daily challenges are “multidisciplinary, and many require integration of multiple STEM concepts to solve them” (p. 31). The emerging new standards have responded to the call for a more interdisciplinary approach and have infused more critical thinking and integration of other content areas (e.g. English/Language Arts inclusion of science, NGSS focus on mathematics, and engineering).

The STEM Road Map 2.0 provides a complete, K-12 mapping of academic standards (i.e. Common Core and NGSS) organized by five STEM themes that students will experience in a spiraled curriculum that will grow their content knowledge and skills through application within five-week sequences of instruction organized around a problem or a project. The STEM Road Map curriculum is designed to be delivered by teachers in a collaborative, integrated manner where explicit ties to the actual project and/or problem are made within each content area each week of instruction, while one or more of the disciplines serve as the lead for delivery of the module. As a result, students will experience the overlapping nature of integrated STEM learning, and deeper conceptual understanding will be achieved in both STEM and non-STEM disciplines.

Since our publication of the original edition of STEM Road Map: A Framework for Integrated STEM Education (2015), we have partnered with the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) to develop and publish 30 additional books – each of which represents one of the STEM Road Map grade-level units that were mapped out in the original STEM Road Map book. Our approach for STEM Road Map 2.0 is to leave those 30 units as they were originally mapped for this reason. The remaining 30 units were reimagined based upon the need to include more focus on computational thinking and digital literacy (including computer science) within the curriculum. Our plan is to move forward with mapping out and writing those additional curriculum books in the near future – making the entire series available for transforming K-12 STEM education.

Integrated STEM Themes in the STEM Road Map

The foundation of the STEM Road Map 2.0 is meaningful integration of the STEM disciplines within the context of real-world challenges and problems in K-12 classrooms (e.g. Breiner, Harkness, Johnson, & Koehler, 2012; Johnson, 2013; Rennie, Venville, & Wallace, 2012; Roehrig et al., 2012) with attention to computational thinking and digital literacy. Research has demonstrated the ability of an integrated STEM curriculum focus to improve academic outcomes and college preparedness (Johnson & Sondergeld, 2020). Integrated STEM is primarily about providing opportunities for students to learn in settings that require interdisciplinary boundaries to be crossed; in particular, integrated STEM education is an effort by educators to have students participate in engineering design and engineering thinking as a means to develop and/or explore technologies in a manner that requires deep learning and application of mathematics and/or science as well as consideration of other disciplines (e.g. social studies and English/language arts).

The STEM Road Map is organized around five real-world STEM themes that serve as the focus for delivery of the spiraled curriculum in grades K-12. Each of these themes will have a focused STEM topic within each grade level that is tied to the appropriate academic content standards. An overview of each theme is presented in this chapter to provide the context for the grade-level theme-based topics that will appear in this book.

Cause and Effect

The concept of Cause and Effect is a powerful and pervasive notion in the STEM fields. It is the foundation of understanding how and why things happen as they do. Humans spend considerable effort and resources trying to understand the causes and effects of natural and designed phenomena to gain better control over events and environment and to be prepared to react appropriately. Equipped with the knowledge of a specific cause and effect relationship, one can lead better lives or contribute to the community by altering the cause leading to a different effect. For example, if a person recognizes that irresponsible energy consumption leads to global climate change, that person can act to remedy their contribution to the situation. Although cause and effect is a core idea in the STEM fields, it is actually very difficult to determine. Students should similarly be capable of understanding when evidence points to cause and effect as well as when evidence points to relationships, but not direct causality. The major goal of education is to foster students to be empowered, analytic thinkers, capable of thinking through complex processes to make important decisions. An understanding of causality, as well as understanding when causality cannot be determined, will help students become better consumers, global citizens, and community members.

Innovation and Progress

The theme of Innovation and Progress as conceptualized for the STEM Road Map consists of ideas that use established concepts to move the STEM fields forward. One of the most important factors in determining if humans will have a positive future is innovation. Innovation is the driving force behind progress, which helps to make possibilities that did not exist before. Innovation and progress are creative entities, but in the STEM fields, they are anchored by evidence and logic. In creating something new, students must consider what is already known in the STEM fields and apply this knowledge appropriately. When we innovate, we create value that was not there previously and create new conditions and possibilities for even more innovations. Students should consider how their innovations might affect progress and use their STEM thinking to change current human burdens to benefits. For example, if we develop more efficient cars that use by-products from another manufacturing industry, such as food processing, then we have used waste productively and reduced the need for the waste to be hauled away, an indirect benefit of the innovation.

The Represented World

When we communicate about the world we live in, how the world works, and how we can meet the needs of humans, sometimes we can use the actual phenomena to explain a concept. However, sometimes the concept is too big, too slow, too small, too fast, or too complex for us to explain using the actual phenomena, and we must use a representation or a model to help communicate the important features. We need representations and models such as graphs, tables, mathematical expressions, and diagrams because it makes our thinking visible. For example, when explaining about geologic time, we cannot actually observe the passage of such large chunks of time, so we create a timeline or a model that uses a proportional scale to visually illustrate how much time has passed for different eras. Another example may be something too complex for students in a particular grade level, such as explaining the p subshell orbitals of electrons to fifth graders. Instead, we use the Bohr model, which more closely represents the orbiting of planets, which is accessible to fifth graders. When we create models, they are always helpful because they point out the most important features of a phenomenon. We also create representations of the world with mathematical functions, which help us to change parameters to suit the situation. Creating representations of phenomenon engages students because they enhance the information and communicate it directly. However, models also leave out some of the details that occur with the phenomena. Because models are helpful, but are also estimates of a phenomenon, it is important for students to evaluate their usefulness as well as what they leave out because they are estimates of an occurrence.

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