COMMENTARY

Bringing STEM Into Focus

What do we intend when using the acronym STEM? It literally stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but what does it mean? Arguably, attempts to provide a meaningful response to these questions have not stuck. It is not for lack of trying, however. State education agencies, national membership organizations, advocacy groups, and state policymakers have been seeking definitions for STEM for quite some time, and with good reason. Today, not only do we have numerous definitions of STEM, but we also have branded numerous entities to be STEM councils, STEM schools, STEM networks, and STEM curricular outcomes. Despite the well-intended branding, understanding of the brand itself remains elusive. It is a conundrum.

While the STEM-definition conundrum can cause confusion, there is reason for optimism. It is our belief that some important conceptual ground has been gained on this conundrum, and it is ground worthy of exploration.

Several recent reports, including the National Research Council's "A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Con...," offer a vision for science and science education with significant implications, if not clues, for the "what is STEM?" question. For example, the K-12 framework effectively turns attention away from a content-specific definition of STEM to a more epistemic one—the sources, strategies, or practices from which science and, by extension, STEM knowledge comes and, in turn, is shared. It may well be that this long-standing inability to come up with an appropriate definition for STEM is an outgrowth of framing STEM as a fixed entity, an "it" instead of an assemblage of practices and processes that transcend disciplinary lines and from which knowledge and learning of a particular kind emerges.

Re-visioning school science around science and engineering practices, such as model-building, data analysis, and evidence-based reasoning, is a transformative step, a step found in the NRC report, which is critical to STEM learners and teachers, both K-12 and postsecondary. It puts forward the message that knowledge-building practices found under the STEM umbrella are practices frequently held in common by STEM professionals across the disciplines as they investigate, model, communicate, and explain the natural and designed world.

In addition to shared science and engineering practices, the NRC framework introduces us to crosscutting concepts (major ideas that cut across discipline lines) such as scale, proportion, and quantity or the use of patterns. Likewise, disciplinary core ideas (ideas with major explanatory power across science and engineering disciplines) are introduced. Together with shared practices, these three dimensions of the NRC framework—practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas—reflect the realities of contemporary science and engineering, inclusive of mathematics, where concepts and practices, often very dependent on technologies, create productive bridges across STEM disciplines. Such bridges make interdisciplinary collaboration possible and, most importantly, provide a set of strategies and tools unique to the process of STEM learning ...

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