Unveiling Pre-service Teachers’ Competency and Challenges in Designing 5E Inquiry-based Integrated STEM Lessons: A Quantitative Ethnography Approach

The purpose of this study is to unveil pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) competencies and the challenges they encounter when designing 5E inquiry-based integrated Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (iSTEM) lessons, as well as their perspectives on the underlying factors for these challenges. Data were collected through lesson plans and reflections from 44 pre-service iSTEM teachers. We used a scoring rubric, descriptive statistics, and Friedman tests with Conover’s post-hoc tests to analyze the submitted lesson plans and evaluate PSTs’ competency in crafting lesson plans. Quantitative ethnography (QE), grounded in PSTs’ reflections, was then employed to identify challenges and factors, with epistemic network analysis (ENA) modeling the relationships among these identified codes. The results indicate that while PSTs can design high-quality iSTEM lesson plans using the 5E model, they face concurrent challenges in the Explore, Elaborate, and Evaluate phases. They also reported difficulties in ensuring coherence across different phases and providing adequate content. Various factors, including PSTs’ views on inquiry, their understanding of the 5E model, comprehension of STEM knowledge, and attitudes toward task design, contribute to these challenges, and the predominant reason is their low level of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Based on these findings, this study offers practical suggestions for both teacher educators and PSTs and contributes to the design and implementation of iSTEM teacher education courses.