Educators

This page offers summaries of STEM research findings relevant to teachers, counselors, and administrators.

Classroom Teachers

  • Active learning and project-based instruction are optimal for STEM learning across the subject areas and among all age groups of students.
  • Use scenarios or examples from students’ lived experiences or youth culture as classroom illustrations of STEM concepts to maximize students’ interest and grasp of the material.
  • Employ complex instruction in heterogeneous groups can address the ranges among students’ skill levels and gaps in their initial stocks of knowledge. Group work has multiple benefits for learning STEM including boosting both skills and self-confidence of all students.
  • Accelerate learning to address skill deficits rather than remediate by tracking or grouping.
  • Demonstrate that you care about each student’s learning the subject you teach.
  • Awaken girls’ interest in STEM early in their educational careers and provide opportunities for them to develop confidence in their STEM capabilities.
  • Reject stereotypes of who can do STEM. Acknowledge diversity within students and reinforce that there is a place for students from all genders, ethnic/racial groups, income levels, the zip code in which they live, the language they speak, and their immigration status.
  • Recognize the important links that exist between STEM and the larger social good. Identify the link STEM fields often have with issues about which students care deeply.
  • Regardless of their prior academic achievement or expressed interest in science and mathematics, recognize that every student is capable of doing STEM in some capacity.
  • Sponsor extra-curricular activities that build interest in STEM and confidence in students’ STEM capacities.
  • Encourage students to participate in the STEM-related extracurricular activities.

Counselors

  • Enroll students in Algebra as early as possible (preferably in middle school) so that they are better able to acquire the mathematical skills needed for secondary school sequences of math and science courses required for later STEM pursuits.
  • Enroll students in Physics, a STEM gateway course, so that they are the better able to acquire the academic skills needed for later STEM pursuits.
  • Use multiple indicators of students’ STEM readiness and interest to avoid stereotyping low-income and disadvantaged minority youths’ capacities to enroll in advanced levels of STEM courses.
  • Accelerate learning to address skill deficits rather than remediate by tracking students into lower level science and math courses.
  • Introduce students to the many long term benefits a career in STEM might have for society, their own, and their families’ futures.
  • Encourage students participate in extra-curricular activities that build interest in STEM and confidence in their STEM capacities.
  • Create partnerships with community members who can mentor STEM students’ awareness and interest in the fields.
  • Encourage faculty, staff, and student to engage in more STEM related co-curricular/extracurricular activities.

Administrators

  • Ensure every student has access to the full range of STEM courses at all levels (general to AP) by creating partnerships/consortia with nearby schools so that advanced courses not taught in one school are taught at other schools.
  • Ensure every STEM course is taught by teachers certified in math and science (please no physical education or history teachers teaching physics).
  • Hire female and underrepresented minority faculty to teach in STEM courses.
  • Create a school climate with a high-level academic press that includes expectations for STEM success from all students irrespective of their gender, SES and ethnic background.
  • Create a Collective Pedagogic Teaching Culture where teachers share in goals of the school, communicate regularly with their subject area peers and otherwise coordinate their professional activities with their colleagues.
  • Develop community partnerships with local university, business, civic, and local government actors to augment and facilitate students’ STEM success.