Advancing the State of the Art of STEM Integration

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Journal of STEM Education Volume 15 • Issue 1 January-April 2014 5
Advancing the State of the Art of STEM Integration
Tamara J. Moore Karl A. Smith
Purdue University University of Minnesota and Purdue University
GUEST EDITORIAL
The inaugural issue (Volume 1, Number 1, 2000) of the Journal of STEM
Education (then titled Journal of SMET Education) included an article by Nor-
man Fortenberry titled “An examination of NSF’s programs in undergraduate
education.” Fortenberry provided a comprehensive summary of the National
Science Foundation (NSF) undergraduate education and training programs,
which he categorized in ve areas for impact in SMET education – curricula
and institutions, faculty, courses and laboratories, diversity, and students. He
concluded, “With sucient resources, NSF can both strengthen its core pro-
grams and address unmet needs and opportunities. Unmet opportunities can
be grouped into ve areas: (1) systemic reform of curricula and institutions,
(2) high-quality instruction by faculty, (3) educational research, materials, and
methods, (4) emphasis on meeting the needs of diverse student populations,
and (5) student support (p. 4).” Since Fortenberry’s call for embracing research
(area 3), discipline-based education research has advanced through the eorts
of a rapidly increasing community of researchers, the emergence of engineer-
ing education research (and more broadly STEM education research) centers
and programs, and reports, such as, the 2012 National Research Council (NRC)
report, Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER; NRC, 2012a).
Discipline-based education research in science and engineering has con-
tinually advanced in the past ten years. Engineering education research (EER)
has been on the fast track since 2004 with a dramatic rise in the number of
PhDs awarded and the establishment of new programs, even entire EER de-
partments (Benson, Becker, Cooper, Grin, & Smith, 2010). The rapid ad-
vancement of EER has been documented in a series of editorials (Smith, 2006;
Streveler & Smith, 2006; 2010) and EER Networking sessions at American
Society for Engineering Education conferences. Smith and Streveler have orga-
nized and facilitated Engineering Education Research and Innovation (EER&I)
networking meetings at each ASEE annual conference since 2010. Each session
was attended by between 40 and 60 representatives of engineering education
research and innovation programs, departments and centers. At ASEE 2014
the networking sessions will be held at the EER Lounge, which is part of the
Engineering Education Research and Innovation space in the Exhibition area.
The 2012 National Research Council’s Discipline-Based Education Research
(DBER) report captures the state-of-the-art advances in our understanding
of engineering student learning and highlights commonalities with other
science-based education research programs. The DBER report is the consensus
analysis of experts in undergraduate education research in physics, chemistry,
biology, geosciences, astronomy, and engineering. The study committee also
included higher education researchers, learning scientists, and cognitive psy-
chologists. Editorials on the DBER report have been published in ASEE Prism
(Singer & Smith, 2013a) and the Journal of Engineering Education (Singer &
Smith, 2013b). A recent special issue of the Journal of Research on Science
Teaching was devoted to Discipline-Centered Postsecondary Science Education
Research.
Now that the EER community has been established and is growing, it is
time to explore the next major advancement, STEM integration, and the Jour-
nal of STEM Education, which was established in 2000, is the ideal venue to
present this editorial. Research-to-practice eorts on STEM integration are the
central organizing feature of the University of Minnesota STEM Education Center,
established in 2009 by co-founders Tamara Moore and Gillian Roehrig and cur-
rently led by Karl Smith and Kathleen Cramer. Our purposes for this editorial are
to summarize STEM integration in both K-12 and undergraduate education with
a focus on U.S. and international trends. We will feature known best practices and
programs both in classrooms and in research around STEM integration.
What is STEM integration?
In general, integrated STEM education is an eort to combine the four
disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics into one
class, unit, or lesson that is based on connections among these disciplines and
real-world problems. More specically, STEM integration refers to students
participating in engineering design as a means to develop relevant technolo-
gies that require meaningful learning through integration and application of
mathematics and/or science. STEM integration gets its roots from the progres-
sive education movement of the early 1900s (e.g., Dewey, 1938) and more
recently the socio-cognitive research movement (NRC, 2000). Therefore, high
quality integrated STEM learning experiences include, but are not limited to,
the following: engage students in engineering design challenges that allow for
them to learn from failure and participate in redesign, use relevant contexts for
the engineering challenges to which students can personally relate, require the
learning and use of appropriate science and/or mathematics content, engage
students in content using student-centered pedagogies, and promote com-
munication skills and teamwork (Moore, Guzey, & Brown, 2014). Implementa-
tion of STEM integration can involve one or more instructors (Roehrig, Moore,
Wang, & Park, 2012), one or more classes (Berlin & White, 1995), and can
require diering lengths of time to complete (Isaacs, Wagreich, & Gartzman,
1997).
There are two dierent ways to integrate content and engineering think-
ing: context integration and content integration. Context integration refers to
an integration of engineering design as a motivator to teach some disciplin-
ary content (usually mathematics and/or science). The learning goals are not
about the engineering per se, but rather engineering design as a pedagogy
to help students learn the content. Content integration refers to an integra-
tion of engineering thinking and mathematics/science content where learning
multiple areas including engineering are part of the learning objectives for the
activity or unit. Here, the learning goals would include mathematics and/or
science content but also include engineering learning as a desired outcome
(Moore et al., 2014). Whether a learning activity is content or context integra-
tion depends upon where emphasis is placed. For example, the NanoRough-
ness Model-Eliciting Activity is an activity that can serve both purposes. The
problem is set in an engineering context where the students are working for
a company that is developing coatings for hip-joint replacements. The student
teams need to design a way to measure the roughness of coatings at the nano-
scale given atomic-force microscope images of coating materials. In a context
integration implementation of this activity, a statistics instructor might use the
engineering context as a motivator but focus heavily on the ways students use
the ideas of sampling, central tendency, and variance that are required to de-

Journal of STEM Education Volume 15 • Issue 1 January-April 2014 6
velop the procedure for measuring roughness (Hjalmarson, Moore, & delMas,
2011). Whereas, a rst-year engineering instructor might want to take a con-
tent integration approach calling attention to the engineering design think-
ing by helping the students recognize the iterative engineering thinking used
in the development of their roughness model, using the engineering context
to bring out the chemistry concepts by focusing on the minimization of wear
on the hip joint coating highlighting the molecular structure of the coatings,
and the statistical analysis methods needed in the roughness model (Moore
& Hjalmarson, 2010). Context and content integration approaches to STEM
integration are useful to help students recognize the interconnectedness of the
STEM disciplines. Smith and Karr-Kidwell (2000) state that the goal of an inte-
grated STEM education is to be “a holistic approach that links the disciplines so
the learning becomes connected, focused, meaningful, and relevant to learn-
ers” (p. 22), and both of these approaches are useful to achieving these ends.
Current Status of STEM Integration
STEM integration is taking hold in both the K-12 and postsecondary arenas.
The current movement in K-12 education to integrate engineering design into
science education is evidence that the ideas of STEM integration are taking root.
The document A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting
Concepts, and Core Ideas (NRC, 2012b) outlines a broad set of expectations for
K-12 science education students. Through these expectations, the framework
documents a new vision for K-12 science education that includes engineering
enterprises as well as scientic ones.
The recently published Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS
Lead States, 2013), which are academic science standards that were developed
based on A Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012b), require el-
ementary and secondary science teachers to use engineering design pedago-
gies as one method for teaching science content. At the minimum, this repre-
sents a context integration approach to learning science, but it also represents
an opportunity to develop and foster content integration approaches, which
give relevance to all content areas and are more representative of the problems
that our society faces. As states in the U.S adopt NGSS and as other countries
consider the integration of engineering into the precollege curriculum, the
need for understanding how learning progressions for engineering design and
relevant science content objectives work together becomes more imperative.
Initiatives that focus on STEM integration are becoming more and more
prevalent. Emphasis is being placed on researchers and practitioners to con-
sider STEM integrated curricula and pedagogies. We are now seeing STEM
focused articles and entire issues in research and practitioner journals (e.g.,
School Science and Mathematics - Volume 112, Issue 1; The Science Teacher -
Volume 80, Issue 1; and Mathematics in the Middle School - Volume 18, Issue
6). Curricula have been and are being developed to address the need for inte-
grating STEM meaningfully. The National Research Council report, Successful
K-12 STEM Education: Identifying Eective Approaches in Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics (2011), describes models of schools across the
country that focus on integrated STEM ideas.
Research in STEM integration is also being given emphasis. The recent
joint report of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National
Research Council, STEM Integration in K-12 Education: Status, Prospects, and
an Agenda for Research (NAE & NRC, 2014) describes theoretical models of
STEM integration with the purpose of shaping research and practice of STEM
integration at the K-12 level, with particular emphasis on curriculum design
and assessment development. This work came out of the NAE project, Toward
Integrated STEM Education: Developing A Research Agenda (2013), which re-
sulted in the above report that provides a structured research agenda for “de-
termining the approaches and conditions most likely to lead to positive out-
comes” of STEM integration. A related report, Developing Assessments for the
Next Generation Science Standards (NRC, 2013), includes recommendations for
classroom and larger-scale assessments that are related to STEM integration
due to the NGSS integration of engineering into science learning. Collabora-
tive research endeavors by groups of faculty, such as the one described for the
University of Minnesota’s STEM Education Center, are being formed. Faculty
positions in integrated STEM education are being created. For example, Pur-
due University has announced a cluster-hire for K-12 Integrated STEM Teacher
Education through which six open-rank faculty positions will be lled with
the intention of targeting the issue of STEM integration through research-to-
practice endeavors.
With the U.S. and international emphasis on increasing the number of
STEM graduates (PCAST, 2012; NRC, 2012c) the integration of engineering into
K-12 science standards has excellent potential for encouraging more students
to pursue STEM, especially engineering careers, and better preparing them
to success in post-secondary settings. The work of Carr, Bennett, and Strobel
(2012) and Moore, Tank, Glancy, Kersten, and Ntow (2013) have documented
the status of the integration of engineering in K-12 across the US through as-
sessment of academic standards documents showing the trend of integrating
engineering into science and mathematics is increasing in the United States.
Research from around the world is also showing trends for increasing K-12
STEM integration initiatives. Researchers such as Dr. Lyn English of Queensland
University of Technology in Australia, and Dr. Nicholas Mousoulides of Univer-
sity of Nicosia in Cyprus are studying STEM integration interventions in class-
rooms as well (e.g., English & Mousoulides, 2011).
Undergraduate STEM Integration
STEM integration currently has much less presence in undergraduate STEM
education than in K-12; however, there are signs that this may be changing.
Fairweather (2008) argues in his summary report, Linking Evidence and Prom-
ising Practices in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)
Undergraduate Education for a National Research Council workshop,
“… although faculty in STEM disciplines vary substantially on a broad ar-
ray of attitudinal and behavioral measures (Fairweather & Paulson, 2008)
careful reviews of the substantial literature on college teaching and learn-
ing suggest that the pedagogical strategies most eective in enhancing
student learning outcomes are not discipline dependent (Pascarella &
Terenzini, 1991; 2005). Instead, active and collaborative instruction cou-
pled with various means to encourage student engagement invariably lead
to better student learning outcomes irrespective of academic discipline
(Kuh, 2008; Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, & Witt, 2005; Kuh, Kinzie, Buckley, Bridges,
& Kayek, 2007). The assumption that pedagogical eectiveness is disci-
plinary-specic can result in “reinventing the wheel,” proving yet again that
pedagogies engaging students lead to better learning outcomes (p. 4-5).”
A pedagogical shift that has taken hold in undergraduate STEM education
is the use of cooperative learning and this shift has excellent potential for in-
creasing STEM integration. Cooperative learning was introduced nationally to
engineering educators at the 1981 Frontiers in Education Conference in Rapid
City, SD (Smith, Johnson, & Johnson, 1981a); a little over 30 years after Mor-
ton Deutsch‘s pivotal article (Deustch, 1949). The 1981 paper was based on
David and Roger Johnson‘s pioneering work (Johnson & Johnson, 1974) as
identied by Karl Smith in the mid-1970s as a promising practice for engi-
neering education. Also in 1981 an article, Structuring Learning Goals to Meet
the Goals of Engineering Education (Smith et al., 1981b), was published in the
Journal of Engineering Education. Cooperative learning is now embraced by
many engineering faculty (Smith, 2011), and its use is increasing by faculty at
large as indicated by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute Survey of
Faculty as shown in Table 1 (DeAngelo, Hurtado, Pryor, Kelly, & Santos, 2009).
The adoption of cooperative learning provides a foundation for science, tech-
nology, engineering, and math faculty to embrace STEM integration.

Journal of STEM Education Volume 15 • Issue 1 January-April 2014 7
Closely related to cooperative learning is the increase in focus on “chal-
lenge-based learning” (Bransford, Vye, and Bateman, 2002), which is another
change needed for STEM integration. Challenges can be presented in many
formats, such as, real data and experiences, simulations, and fabricated scenar-
ios. Professional schools – medicine, law, engineering, business – have been
using this approach under names such as problem-based learning, case-based
learning, and project-based learning. One of the most popular research-based
instructional approaches that embraces challenge-based learning is SCALE-UP
(Student Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-Down Programs;
http://scaleup.ncsu.edu/). SCALE-UP classrooms have been implemented at
North Carolina State University, MIT, the University of Minnesota and the Uni-
versity of Iowa. A recent issue of New Directions for Teaching and Learning was
devoted to active learning spaces and features the SCALE-UP approach (Bae-
pler, Brooks, & Walker, 2014). While cooperative learning and challenge-based
learning programs are a start to STEM integration in undergraduate STEM edu-
cation, more eorts are needed in this area.
There are some indications that a few undergraduate STEM programs are
attempting STEM integration, such as Olin College and Iron Range Engineer-
ing; however the extent and depth of STEM integration is much less evident
than in K-12. Clearly, there is room for advancement of STEM Integration in
undergraduate STEM programs. As engineering educators continue to work
to align student learning outcomes, assessment practices, and instruction (or
pedagogy) more emphasis on STEM integration will become critically impor-
tant (Streveler, Smith, & Pilotte, 2012).
How to Make Progress
Progress in K-12 STEM integration needs to come on multiple fronts.
Among these are curricula development, teacher and administrator education
initiatives, school change initiatives, and policy initiatives. The following high-
light some ideas of how to make changes regarding these four issues:
• There is a need for curricula that integrate STEM contexts for teaching
disciplinary content in meaningful ways that go beyond the blending
of traditional types of understandings. Curricula that integrate STEM are
rare for K-12 spaces, and of those that do, even fewer are research-based
and have meaningful mathematics and science. Funding to back new
research-based STEM integration curricular innovations is needed and
should be targeted.
• Teachers and administrators need professional learning experiences that
prepare them to work within and develop STEM integration learning en-
vironments for K-12 students. Most instructors, teachers, and administra-
tors have not learned disciplinary content using STEM contexts, nor have
they taught in this manner, and therefore new models of teaching must
be developed if STEM integration is to lead to meaningful STEM learning.
Programs should be developed at local and state levels to promote this
change in practice. School change is needed to support STEM integration.
Schools are set up to silo the disciplines of STEM. This separation is an
artifact of history. While it is good to learn each subject as a stand-alone, it
is also imperative that students see the interconnectedness of the subjects
they are learning.
Methods Used in “All” or “Most” Classes All Faculty 2005 - % All Faculty 2008 - % Assistant – 2008 - %
Cooperative Learning 48 59 66
Group Projects 33 36 61
Grading on a curve 19 17 14
Term/research papers 35 44 47
Table 1. The American College Teacher: National Norms for 2007-2008
• Schools need to make structural changes that will allow students to do
both - learn the nature of each of the STEM disciplines and learn that they
are interconnected in ways that is more like what they will encounter in
real-world problems. This will take concerted eorts at local, state, and
national levels if this is to be achieved.
• Policymakers need to consider that our ever-changing world requires
updates in the manner that we educate our students of the future. The
research around STEM integration as one method of teaching K-12 stu-
dents is very promising. Current policy initiatives that include high-stakes
testing only on mathematics and language arts, school improvement
measures based solely on scores on these tests, and teacher performance
policies that are based primarily on these tests are hurting our education
system. Schools and teachers make educational decisions about what
and how to teach based on getting their students to perform better on
these tests. This results in students not having access to science, technol-
ogy, or engineering until later in their education, and in our opinion, the
mathematics students are taught represent only the procedural nature of
mathematics, not the structure of mathematics. In order to help alleviate
this problem, policymakers must fully consider what the research is tell-
ing us about how students learn, how they engage, and what can lead to
more meaningful citizenry.
STEM integration in K-12 has the potential to help students learn more deep-
ly, enjoy the STEM disciplines, and provide them better access to future careers.
The above suggestions may help move us forward in achieving these goals.
Although the suggestions above were focused on K-12 STEM integration,
similar ideas are applicable for undergraduate STEM, where there is as much or
more disciplinary siloing. STEM integration is sorely lacking in undergraduate
STEM programs. We hope it will be the next shift.
Froyd, Wankat, and Smith (2012) identied ve major shifts in engineering
education in the past 100 years:
1. A shift from hands-on and practical emphasis to engineering science and
analytical emphasis;
2. A shift to outcomes-based education and accreditation;
3. A shift to emphasizing engineering design;
4. A shift to applying education, learning, and social-behavioral sciences
research; and
5. A shift to integrating information, computational, and communications
technology in education.
They argue that the rst two shifts are completed and the last three are in
progress.
The DBER study is particularly focused on Shift 4, applying education,
learning, and social-behavioral sciences research (Singer & Smith, 2013b).
The next major shift we argue in this editorial will be the re-integration of
these ve shifts with special emphasis on integrating the practical and math-
ematical, achieving the outcome of integrative STEM thinking, situating much
of the work in an engineering design context, and basing the work on educa-
tion, learning, and social-behavioral sciences research.
As a pioneer in STEM education scholarship, we see the Journal of STEM
Education as a principal venue for documentation advancing the state of the
art of STEM integration.

Journal of STEM Education Volume 15 • Issue 1 January-April 2014 8
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Journal of STEM Education Volume 15 • Issue 1 January-April 2014 10
Tamara J. Moore, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue
University. Dr. Moore’s research is centered on the integration of STEM concepts in K-12 and
higher education mathematics, science, and engineering classrooms in order to help students
make connections among the STEM disciplines and achieve deep understanding. Her research
agenda focuses on dening STEM integration and investigating its power for student learning.
She is creating and testing innovative, interdisciplinary curricular approaches that engage
students in developing models of real world problems and their solutions. Her research also
involves working with educators to shift their expectations and instructional practice to
facilitate eective STEM integration.
Tamara is currently working on two National Science Foundation supported projects:
The STEM Integration CAREER Project and the EngrTEAMS Project. The goal of the STEM
Integration CAREER project (CAREER: Implementing K-12 Engineering Standards through
STEM Integration; NSF – EEC/CAREER, #1055382) is to understand dierent mechanisms
of integrating engineering content and standards into K-12 classrooms through STEM
integration. Through this funding, a “Framework for Quality K-12 Engineering Education” has
been developed. The framework will be used as a tool for evaluating the degree to which
academic standards, curricula, and teaching practices address the important components of
a quality K-12 engineering education. Tamara is the Principal Investigator of the EngrTEAMS
(Engineering to Transform the Education of Analysis, Measurement, and Science in a Targeted
Mathematics-Science Partnership, NSF – MSP, #1238140) project, which works with teachers
to increase science and mathematics learning through engineering for 15,000 students in 4th-
8th grades. It provides summer professional development and curriculum writing workshops
to allow teachers to design curricular units focused on science concepts, meaningful data
analysis, and measurement. Tamara is the co-chair of the Focus on Engineering Writing
Team for the National Association for Research in Science Teaching Position Paper for the
Next Generation Science Standards and was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for
Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2012.
Karl A. Smith, Ph.D., is Cooperative Learning Professor of Engineering Education,
School of Engineering Education, at Purdue University. He is also Emeritus Professor of Civil
Engineering, Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor, Executive Co-Director STEM
Education Center, and Faculty Member, Technological Leadership Institute at the University of
Minnesota. Karl has been actively involved in engineering education research and practice for
over forty years and has worked with thousands of faculty all over the world on pedagogies
of engagement, especially cooperative learning, problem-based learning, and constructive
controversy. His research and development interests include building research and
innovation capabilities in engineering education; faculty and graduate student professional
development; the role of cooperation in learning and design; problem formulation, modeling,
and knowledge engineering; and project and knowledge management and leadership. He is
a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education and past Chair of the Educational
Research and Methods Division.
Karl is PI of the NSF Workshop: Innovation Corps for Learning (I-Corps-L): A Pilot
Initiative to Propagate & Scale Educational Innovations (NSF DUE-1355431). He has been
co-PI on two NSF Centers for Learning and Teaching (CLT), including the Center for the
Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE), and co-PI on a NSF-CCLI-ND—Rigorous
Research in Engineering Education: Creating a Community of Practice. He served on the
Committee on the Status, Contributions, and Future Directions of Discipline-Based Education
Research that produced the National Research Council Report, Discipline-Based Education
Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering.
He has written eight books including How to model it: Problem solving for the computer
age; Cooperative learning: Increasing college faculty instructional productivity; Strategies for
energizing large classes: From small groups to learning communities; and Teamwork and project
management, 4th Ed.