Scaffolds for Educators for Designing STEM Activities

With the rapid development of STEM (the acronym of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, the importance of conceptual frameworks to facilitate teachers' design and implementation of STEM activities (activities in STEM lessons, curriculum, and other learning opportunities) has been highlighted. Frameworks could help teachers, especially those who are new to STEM education, to construct and design learning objectives and plan their teaching. This chapter provides an overview of the different frameworks in STEM education developed by educators in Asia that could facilitate teacher lesson planning and implementation. The frameworks reviewed range from those proposed in official documents by education administration sectors to those developed by researchers and educators. Descriptions of examples of these frameworks have also been provided where available. We compared the reviewed frameworks and classified them into micro (usually dealing with classroom-level or pedagogical issues), meso (usually less detailed but may be very helpful for curriculum development), and macro (usually help to guide the arrangement of a group of different curricula or a multi-year plan of STEM curricula) levels. The chapter also summarizes other features, including but not limited to integration level/mode, implementation strategy, and evaluation, for each framework, and proposes future directions for this field of study.