Integrated STEM education is increasingly present in classrooms and in educational research, as it is proposed as a possible strategy to improve the problems of students’ lack of interest in scientific–technological disciplines. However, this increased interest in STEM education has been paralleled by a loss of cohesion in the interpretations of its theoretical basis and by an ongoing discussion on integrated STEM education’s foundations, making its understanding, translation into real projects, and evaluation difficult to undertake. Published articles defining a STEM theoretical framework have different descriptions, so the aim of this systematic literature review is to analyse these explanations and compare them with each other. Following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, 27 articles of interest about STEM and STEAM education were obtained and analysed with a focus on the principles and characteristics described in the texts. After organising the information and analysing the similarities and differences in the principles and characteristics, we concluded that there is great consensus on the principles of “integration”, “real-world problems”, “inquiry”, “design”, and “teamwork”. Nonetheless, this review identifies areas of discussion regarding both the principles and their characteristics that invite further analysis to refine our understanding of what integrated STEM education should entail.

We have investigated whether and how a categorization of responses to questions on linear distance-time graphs, based on a study of Irish students enrolled in an algebra-based course, could be adopted and adapted to responses from students enrolled in calculus-based physics courses at universities in Flanders, Belgium (KU Leuven) and the Basque Country, Spain (University of the Basque Country). We discuss how we adapted the categorization to accommodate a much more diverse student cohort and explain how the prior knowledge of students may account for many differences in the prevalence of approaches and success rates. Although calculus-based physics students make fewer mistakes than algebra-based physics students, they encounter similar difficulties that are often related to incorrectly dividing two coordinates. We verified that a qualitative understanding of kinematics is an important but not sufficient condition for students to determine a correct value for the speed. When comparing responses to questions on linear distance-time graphs with responses to isomorphic questions on linear water level versus time graphs, we observed that the context of a question influences the approach students use. Neither qualitative understanding nor an ability to find the slope of a context-free graph proved to be a reliable predictor for the approach students use when they determine the instantaneous speed.

We conducted a study with introductory and upper-division level physics students in a Mexican and a Spanish university to learn how students recognize the main characteristics of the electric field in three of its more widely used representations, namely, algebraic notation, vector field plot, and electric field lines, and how the students do conversions of them. The students’ abilities to recognize the three representations of the electric field and do conversions gave insight into their understanding of this concept. We used the theory of registers of semiotic representations as a framework to analyze the data. Our results showed that the direction of the conversion is an essential factor in determining the students’ success in performing conversions of electrical field representations. We found close synergy between the vector field plot and the algebraic notation of the electric field. However, we found that the conversions that involve electric field lines do not present synergy. The electric field lines representation is especially difficult for students, both as a source and as a target representation, specifically, the interpretation and representation of the magnitude of the field through the density of field lines. We recommend that teachers and researchers of electricity and magnetism be more conscious of the difficulties that some conversion tasks may present to their students. We specifically invite instructors to be attentive to how they approach the representation of electric field lines and be explicit when performing conversions that involve electric field lines.

This study examined engineering and physical science students' understanding of the electromagnetic induction (EMI) phenomena. It is assumed that significant knowledge of the EMI theory is a basic prerequisite when students have to think about electromagnetic phenomena. To analyse students' conceptions, we have taken into account the fact that individuals build mental representations to help them understand how a physical system works. Individuals use these representations to explain reality, depending on the context and the contents involved. Therefore, we have designed a questionnaire with an emphasis on explanations and an interview, so as to analyse students' reasoning. We found that most of the students failed to distinguish between macroscopic levels described in terms of fields and microscopic levels described in terms of the actions of fields. It is concluded that although the questionnaire and interviews involved a limited range of phenomena, the identified explanations fall into three main categories that can provide information for curriculum development by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of students' conceptions.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Qualitative Methods in PER: A Critical Examination.] Inquiring about students’ learning and their difficulties understanding the concepts and models of physics is a familiar challenge in physics education research. Researchers have developed various methodologies, such as phenomenography, to address it. Phenomenography is an empirical approach to determining how people experience and understand aspects of their surroundings and the physical world in qualitatively different ways. Rigorous phenomenographic analysis can be used to define categories to describe general ways the students experience the research phenomenon. The phenomenographic analysis process focuses on critical aspects of the collective experience rather than the richness of individual experience, assuming that there are a limited number of categories to describe the variations of experience for a given phenomenon. The possibility of defining a limited number of categories for experiencing a phenomenon on a collective level is one characteristic that makes phenomenographic analysis particularly appropriate for research that aims to enhance teaching and learning. We shall critically examine the strengths and weaknesses of phenomenographic research in this paper. The strengths include integral and holistic descriptions of people’s conceptions. Weaknesses include the risks of equating participants’ experiences with their descriptions of their own experiences. Our contribution weighs up the literature’s warnings about the validity and reliability of phenomenographic research. To provide an overview of phenomenography in physics education research, we conducted a literature review which identified and analyzed different approaches to data collection, data analysis, rigor, presentation of the results, and scope. We conclude by considering phenomenography as a research approach to learn how students perceive a concrete learning phenomenon, thus, providing an essential teaching design and preparation guide for instructors.