STEM teacher education programs for preservice and in-service secondary mathematics teachers: a review study

Few studies have elaborated on how different types of integration can support teachers’ learning and build their capacity to teach for the enhancement of students’ STEM competence. Teaching in a STEM education context requires mathematics teachers to be able to effectively choose, design and implement appropriate tasks in their classes. Given the important role of teachers and tasks as vehicles for STEM education, this paper reviews literature on STEM teacher education programs associated with STEM tasks for preservice and in-service secondary mathematics teachers. After searching for and reviewing the 14 relevant articles, the analytical results indicated that (a) teachers’ STEM knowledge and practices have not been commonly assessed as the outcomes of STEM teacher education programs, although they are explicitly counted as the goals of STEM teacher education programs; (b) the approach of multi-disciplinary concepts integrated with uni-disciplinary practice is mostly adopted as the approach to STEM integration; (c) task design features identified from the articles can be classified by elements of task design (i.e., goals, principles and instructional focus) and task design factors (i.e., disciplinary knowledge, cognition and metacognition, affect); and (d) most programs provide both acquisition and participation approaches to developing mathematics teachers’ knowledge in STEM education. The review results shed light on the design and implementation of STEM tasks and STEM teacher education programs.