Social and Emotional Learning and STEM-Related Education

The STEM education movement emphasises an integrated and transdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Recent initiatives have included the arts and humanities as part of the STEM initiative. STEM education and practice have typically been thought of in relation to the development of discipline-related skills and competencies. However, a primary principle of STEM education is that at least two disciplines be integrated. The underlying premise of this foundational element of STEM is that the solutions to real-world problems are rarely found within one disciplinary perspective or body of knowledge. Researchers have also suggested that an integrated STEM curriculum may provide optimum opportunities to infuse social emotional learning (SEL) principles. However, very few of the studies reviewed in this entry adopt an integrated STEM perspective and instead focus on discipline-specific outcomes, with there being an uneven focus on science and mathematics. Overall, the results of our review demonstrated that varying elements of social emotional competence are differentially associated with performance and practice in individual STEM disciplines. Specifically, self- and emotion regulation, prosocial behaviour, and overall social skills are more strongly predictive of mathematical outcomes, whereas emotion regulation ability is a more robust predictor of science learning, findings that were generally obtained across age periods. On the other hand, perspective-taking and empathy were the important predictors of design thinking and engineering, although research in this area, for the most part, was limited to adult samples. For technology learning and the arts, it was exposure to disciplinary instruction infused with SEL content that positively contributed to student learning outcomes. Emotion knowledge was unrelated to STEM-related outcomes in both childhood and adulthood. Many of the studies we report on include small samples, are correlational, and/or were based on qualitative research methods. Accordingly, very little is known about whether learning in STEM is enhanced by the infusion of SEL content or whether SEL is a consequence of well-designed STEM education courses and/or programmes. Research in this area is also limited by a lack of a theoretical focus that fully formulates how specific SEL dimensions contribute to or are enhanced by STEM. The entry concludes by highlighting potential avenues for future theory-building, empirical research, and the development of innovative curricula and pedagogies that infuse SEL content and STEM education and practice.