STEM Approach as a Means for Students’ Science Learning (original) (raw)

This paper aims to describe the outcomes of a STEM project implemented in five different school clusters. It involved the delivery of STEM curriculum projects, focusing on the contextualization of the curriculum in the students' reality. The study aims to describe students' learning during the development of the project. The research reported in this study is qualitative, adopting an interpretative orientation. Participants were 1097 students belonging to five school clusters from distinct regions of Portugal. The students came from 52 different primary classrooms (n=941), mostly from Year 3 and Year 4, and 9 lower secondary classrooms (n=156), aged between 8 and 15 years-old. Due to the diversity of school clusters and local contexts, the curriculum projects had many differences, even though they were based in the same curriculum guidelines. Data sources were focus group interviews and written documents. The results showed that all curriculum projects allowed students to have positive learning experiences and to develop a significant number of competencies. They mobilized specific scientific knowledge related to the activities, developed scientific competencies such as, to formulate questions, appreciate, justify and evaluate different perspectives, plan, deliver an investigation and communicate their findings, as well as transversal competencies related with the design.