The shortage of graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), has led to numerous attempts to increase students’ interest in STEM. One emerging approach that has the potential to improve students’ motivation for STEM is integrated STEM education. Nonetheless, the implementation of this new instructional strategy is not straightforward due to the lack of consensus about instructional practices in integrated STEM. This paper contributes to this challenge by providing a well-defined framework for instructional practices in integrated STEM in secondary education, based on the results of a systematic review of existing literature. The framework contains five key principles: integration of STEM content, problem-centered learning, inquiry-based learning, design-based learning and cooperative learning. The proposed framework has several benefits, including its applicability in the classroom and the possibility to describe integrated STEM on multiple dimensions. Nonetheless, further research is necessary to investigate the effects of integrated STEM on students’ cognitive and affective learning outcomes.

Our rapidly changing society needs highly-qualified STEM professionals (experts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) to develop solutions to the problems it is facing. Many of the students who graduate from a STEM programme in secondary education, however, opt out of STEM when enrolling in higher education, often due to a loss of interest. To ensure sufficiently high and qualified enrolment in higher STEM education, we need to bridge this gap between secondary and higher STEM education by showing our youngsters the relevance of science and technology to their personal life and environment. To this end, the project STEM@school promoted and studied the idea of integrated STEM in secondary education in Flanders, Belgium. In integrated STEM education, learning contents from the separate STEM courses are linked in an authentic way, as they often are in our environmental challenges. This approach encourages students as well as their teachers to acquire a robust understanding of STEM concepts, and a creative, inquisitive, and collaborative mindset. For the design of integrated STEM curricula, STEM@school united secondary-school STEM teachers and university researchers. This article elaborates on the principles, opportunities and challenges of the design and implementation of these curricula and discusses their promising effects on students’ conceptual understanding and attitudes towards STEM subjects. The article concludes with tips and tricks to get started with integrated STEM education in secondary schools.

The Need for STEM Professionals We are increasingly exposed to complex societal and technological problems. Qualified Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professionals are needed to solve these problems and cope with contemporary demands such as sustainable energy and efficient healthcare [1]. It is not surprising then that the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report (2016) predicted a job gain in STEM fields for the following years [2]. However, we do not only need STEM professionals who can solve these problems. We also need people with a certain level of basic STEM literacy. All citizens, even non-STEM professionals, should have the skills and competences necessary to deal with the challenges of our information-based and highly technological society [3]. STEM-literacy, i.e., the awareness of the nature of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and the familiarity with fundamental concepts from each discipline, should be an educational priority for all students [3], [4].

Graduates with a STEM profile are in great demand, yet the outflow from these fields of study is highly insufficient. This is partly due to the fragmented way STEM learning content is taught in secondary education. Although the problem can be mitigated with the use of integrated STEM education (i.e., iSTEM), teachers are often unfamiliar with this type of education. To support teachers in implementing high-quality iSTEM education, a digital collaborative learning environment called “CODEM for iSTEM” was created. This study examined to what extent student teachers were immersed in six key principles of iSTEM education through cooperative design of iSTEM learning tools in multidisciplinary teams, namely “problem-centered learning”, “integration of different STEM disciplines”, “modeling”, “inquiry-based learning”, “design-based learning”, and “cooperative learning”.

This study models the process of designing learning materials for integrated STEM (iSTEM) in secondary education, as gone through by four multidisciplinary teams of STEM teachers in Flanders (Belgium). In order to identify the crucial, counterproductive, and missing activities in the observed design processes, the learning materials developed by each team were assessed with respect to the key principles of iSTEM education. Crucial activities in the observed design processes appeared to be the formation of a multidisciplinary design team, a brainstorm on themes, the identification and linking of STEM contents, and the exploration of a feasible, engaging student challenge with interrelated subproblems. The observed processes lacked a specification of the targeted learning goals and the inclusion of research-based instructional strategies aiming at these goals. The evidence-based model of the iSTEM design process resulting from this study can fuel teacher training programs and empower pre- and in-service teachers to create high-quality integrated STEM education.

The awareness that many problems in our society are interdisciplinary in nature and require the integration of multiple STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) concepts to solve them has given rise to a new instructional approach, called “integrated STEM education”. Integrated STEM education aims to remove the barriers from the STEM fields and has the potential to increase students’ interest and motivation for learning, as well as to lead to improved achievement. It is important to assess the effectiveness of educational STEM initiatives in terms of students’ integrating ability, but to date, no such instruments are available. This study provides a definition of “integrating ability” and establishes a framework for understanding its components. Based on this definition and framework, a multiple-choice instrument for testing integrated physics and mathematics in the ninth grade (IPM9) was developed and validated. The definition and framework for integrating ability and the construction guidelines for an integrated test, can be used by researchers to assess students’ ability to integrate STEM subjects.