A Survey of Evaluation Approaches in STE(A)M Education

STEM and STEAM (or STE(A)M) education has been widely practised over the past two decades. It involves the disciplinary integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, as well as arts. Evaluation plays an essential role in assessing and improving the effectiveness of STE(A)M educational practices. Despite a broad range of research on evaluating the effectiveness of STE(A)M education, little work has been conducted on summarising and analysing the evaluation approaches. This paper addresses the research gap by examining the literature in relation to the evaluation of STE(A)M education in terms of its research types, evaluation objectives, data collection and analysis methods, and approaches. The study covers a total of 250 related research articles published between 2015 and 2022 which were collected form the Scopus database and analysed using a content analysis approach. The findings reveal that a majority of the articles are experimental and interventional in nature, with an emphasis on examining the effects of STE(A)M education as well as the attitudes and perceptions of stakeholders. The results also show the common use of descriptive statistics, t-tests, ANOVA, and regression as quantitative data analysis approaches, whereas thematic and content analysis were often adopted for qualitative data analysis. The main approaches of STE(A)M education were found to be involved in the articles reviewed, namely problem-centred learning, STE(A)M education integration, inquiry-based learning, design-based learning, and co-operative learning. These findings contribute to enhancing our understanding about evaluation in STE(A)M education, as well as providing practical references for its evaluation practices.