Mathifying STEM or STEMifying Math? Challenges and Possibilities for Mathematics Learning Within Integrated STEM Contexts

Growing recognition of the importance of STEM educationSTEM education has led to an increase in the number of formal and informal STEM programmes. Efforts to evaluate the efficacy and reach of these programmes have not matched the growth in such initiatives and have become a cause for concern. As educational policy and curricular reformSTEM curricular reform in Ireland increasingly advocate an integrated STEM approachIntegrated STEM approaches, we sought to evaluate the efficacy of five integrated STEM activitiesIntegrated STEM activities designed by a team of mathematics educators and 30 preservice primary teachers as part of a semester-long mathematics specialism. Tasks were implemented across five days of intensive STEM workshops with a class of 11–12 year old students. We report on our analysis of video footage of the children’s STEM engagement, alongside focus groups and interviews with the mathematics educators and preservice teachers. Our findings suggest that while STEM tasks were fertile ground for some disciplinary learning (in this case, science and engineering design processEngineering design process) and the development of certain Twenty-first-century skills, they failed to leverage curriculum-appropriate mathematics learningCurriculum-appropriate mathematics learning. We recommend that explicit mathematics disciplinary content be considered when planning STEM tasks to maximise the potential for developing children’s grade-appropriate mathematical thinking and reasoningReasoning. We also present a series of recommendations and practical suggestions to support teachers in foregrounding mathematics when developing or modifying integrated STEM tasksIntegrated STEM tasks and activities, offering a worked example of one of our case lessons (The Harmless Can Holder) to illustrate our findings throughout.