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Federal agencies, states, and school districts should develop robust methods to expand the use of promising innovations that can improve STEM education from pre-K through high school, according to a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Over several decades, the federal government has allocated resources to strengthen education in science, technology, engineering, and math, the report notes. This has led to the development of a rich variety of educational innovations–programs, practices, models, and technologies–to support teaching and learning within the STEM disciplines.
“Overall, investments in innovations in STEM education have resulted in numerous promising programs,” said Christine Massey, chair of the committee that wrote the report, and a senior researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. “However, only a limited number of students routinely experience the benefits of many of these efforts. We need to activate and expand the best of what has been discovered and created.”
The report includes a compendium of over 50 successful evidence-based education innovations across the U.S. The programs span various audiences, subjects, and approaches–ranging from a program to help pre-K students develop informal mathematical knowledge and skills, to a portal that educators can use to access educational materials on climate and energy topics, to a program that helps middle school and high school students learn to code by creating original music remixes.
The innovations in the compendium vary in how successful they are at scaling to reach larger numbers of students across different educational contexts, the report says. Innovations appear more likely to scale if they have certain key characteristics–for example, if they have a strong, clearly articulated core program with room for adaptation to different contexts and learners, and if they include professional learning to build the capacities of individuals or organizations to implement the innovation.
The report also identifies factors that can constrain innovations’ ability to scale. For example, they may be developed in ways that do not take into consideration variation across educational contexts–essentially, there is a disconnect between the context where the innovation was developed and the contexts where it would need to be implemented. Collaboration across multiple sites and iterative cycles of design across time can be a model for addressing this problem, the report says.
Systemic change needed to scale innovations
It is unclear that assembling an array of discrete, innovative programs will result in major improvements in student outcomes, the report says. More robust, systemic change across the education system will likely be needed to achieve that.
To that end, the report recommends steps that agencies and leaders at all levels of the U.S. education system should take to build the system’s ability to facilitate more effective scale-up of innovations. Actions are needed to build the capacity of educators to implement innovations; to enhance the research infrastructure for developing innovations that are scalable and sustainable; to develop methods to support systemic and continuous improvement; and to understand how to monitor progress.
Among the committee’s specific recommendations:
- The National Science Foundation should develop a new generation of systemic initiatives for pre-K to grade 12 STEM education with the goal of building infrastructure, capacity, and expertise to harvest promising evidence-based innovations, prepare them for wider implementation in new settings, and fund backbone organizations to organize the resources and support systems needed to carry out the implementations in schools.
- The U.S. Department of Education should allocate funding for teacher professional learning and development in all STEM disciplines, including science, technology, engineering, mathematics, computer science, and other emerging STEM-focused subjects such as data science.
- School and district leaders should adopt a continuous improvement framework, emphasizing iterative assessment and refinement of strategies to meet the evolving educational landscape. This involves a cycle of planning, implementing, evaluating, and adjusting, with engagement of pertinent individuals to ensure ongoing relevancy.
- To understand the implementation and scaling of pre-K to grade 12 STEM education innovations, state and district partners should develop data systems that capture information about opportunities to learn, including time for instruction, allocation of resources and funding, access to and enrollment in such innovations, and progress toward a highly qualified, robust STEM teacher workforce.
- Leaders of local and regional K-12 systems should work to strengthen learning opportunities in STEM education for key actors in the STEM education learning ecosystem (e.g., teachers, school/district leaders, school board leaders, teacher educators, professional development providers, universities and colleges, museums, nonprofits, families) with an emphasis on building relational connections among communities and sharing knowledge.
The study, undertaken by the Committee on PreK-12 STEM Education Innovations, was sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, engineering, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.
This press release originally appeared online.
