Planning and Assessing a Meaningful STEM Program
Written by Haylie Saarinen, STEM & Digi Tech Specialist, Port Melbourne Primary School
Haylie will be presenting at the STEM across the Curriculum Conference being held on 17 & 18 June 2022 at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre
How do you create an engaging, meaningful STEM program? A big question that isn’t so easily answered. There are many factors to planning and assessing a meaningful STEM program, and the challenging part, it will always be different depending on the school and cohort of children you are teaching. Through experience of trialling STEM programs in various forms over the past 6 years, the following is a collation of ideas stemming from what has worked and the lessons learned through much trial and error in a range of schools and socio-demographics.
The most effective way of creating an engaging and meaningful program is hooking students in! This can be done by creating an inclusive STEM classroom for all. Every child’s brain works differently, therefore each lesson must meet students at their individual point of need. When students connect with content, they think creatively and turn information into knowledge, there’s a well known saying, ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’[1]. Through associative learning students make meaningful connections in STEM.
Create open-ended challenges guided by the curriculum to encourage diversity, creativity and success for all learners. By using big questions, students are hooked in, teachers can then cater for their needs by creating multiple entry and exit points. For example, a big question; What is in the Sky Above Us? Students can look at the moon and create an engineering design to fly to the moon. While other students can look at creating an engineering design to land on an asteroid to mine minerals or send out a telescope to the far reaches of our galaxy to collect information about dark matter! This can be differentiated across year levels and within classrooms to meet the needs of all learners.
Plan using a framework; A great resource is the Design Thinking Framework[2], a design method that allows for collaboration, problem solving and creative thinking to develop solutions to real world problems! [3] A consistent and clear framework is crucial to provide students with structure and support, this builds their growth mindset, confidence and capacity as they are able to use resources and complete challenges with a familiar structure each term.
Make Cross-disciplinary connections explicit; whether this be within your planning or incidentally during class discussions and research (or both!). Students are using their schema, their own experiences and understanding of the world, in each STEM session. By making cross-disciplinary links explicit, students will begin to recognise and articulate these links themselves. For example, a student making text to text / text to world connections, students making connections between their knowledge of geometry or patterns and reflecting on this in their STEM projects.
Explicit Learning Intentions and Success Criteria[4] are also very important in articulating and understanding what students are doing and why. Using Success Criteria allows teachers to differentiate the session to meet the needs of all students, providing multiple entry and exit points in which they can feel success, whether they complete one, two or all three success criteria (some may be modified further for students with Individual Education Plans).
Thorough planning; When planning your unit, have the curriculum and continuums in front of you. A template with the Design Thinking Framework is useful to fill out and map the unit, then think about how to teach the required curriculum by forming the Learning Intentions and Success Criteria across the term. Ask yourself, What do you want students to learn? (curriculum) How do you want students to learn? (explicit and exploration), What cross-disciplinary connections can you make? How will you assess students? Once this skeleton is completed, think about what your children are interested in. What sparks them? What creates a sparkle in their eye? You can create a unit meeting the requirements of the curriculum, while still enabling students to take the unit where they can make meaningful connections and turn information into long term knowledge! For example, when completing a unit on creating a sustainable future, one class decided they loved the pre-planned idea that encouraged students to create biomes, specifically, what do we need in a biome to survive on Mars. However, a class decided they were really interested in learning more about Chernobyl, as one student shared how they had watched a documentary on it and explained the damage done to the surrounding environment. While students were still able to be assessed on the curriculum of “Investigate the suitability of materials, systems, components, tools and equipment for a range of purposes” [5], three classes were engineering biomes, either to live on Mars, in space or in the desert! and one class created designs on how to clean up and make Chernobyl liveable. Although similar concepts, students can have clear interests in quite different topics within the Learning Intentions, and are all able to follow their interests while successfully meeting the Success Criteria for each lesson.
Questioning; The key to encouraging students to think deeply and make meaningful connections with content, is through questioning. Deep questioning is an effective form of assessment and useful tool to teach students at their point of need, otherwise known as the Zone of Proximal Development, “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers”[6]. Examples of questioning include, Why are you using that material? How will that effect xxx? Is there another way you could try? Deep questioning encourages students to think critically about every action and effect of that action. It builds their capacity to think critically when solving problems, to develop a growth mindset and problem solve when facing difficulties.
As Lilburn & Sullivan[7] explain, good questions have certain key features:
“They require more than remembering a fact or reproducing a skill, students can learn by answering the questions, and the teacher learns about each student from the attempt, there may be several acceptable answers.”
Assessment; In a STEM program, assessment needs to be easily collected, there is often so much excitement and busyness that assessment can get lost or forgotten. By using ongoing, anecdotal, meaningful assessment you will be able to collect formative assessment easily to inform your planning. Some methods which are really useful are focus groups, for example STEM Stars. Each week four students from each class are allocated as STEM Stars wearing a lanyard and working in a focus group. Focus groups present an opportunity to record notes and quotes from students to inform planning and use as evidence in semester reports. The STEM Stars get the first chance to share their brainstorms, connections and reflections before the rest of the class during the whole class time also. STEM Stars are differentiated based on previous data, with exception to Foundation students, being allocated in roll order first term, then adjusted as students progress. Input from students is added into the class Learning Journal, which is used as another form of ongoing assessment. For summative assessment methods, rubrics are a good option for assessing engineering designs. Using Success Criteria from each lesson for assessment is useful for students to see their growth and accomplishment over the term. Teachers can provide Success Criteria to students in a checklist over the term to glue in the front of their books and teachers or students themselves highlight as they achieve each Criteria. This is a great way to both inform future planning, create student goals and provide assessment of the term as a whole.
To create a meaningful STEM program, the most important thing to remember is to stay flexible, learn from trial and error and always respond to student feedback and needs. Every cohort, every class within the cohort and every student within the class is different. The best way to ensure success in teaching and learning during STEM is to meet students at their point of need with engaging, meaningful content that they will remember, forever!
Please come along and meet me at the STEM across the Curriculum Conference being held on 17 & 18 June 2022 at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre
[1] Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. New York: Wiley and Sons.
[2] State of Victoria, Department of Education and Training. (2009 to Present). https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/
[3] State of Victoria, Department of Education and Training. (2009 to Present). https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/
[4] The Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). (2017 to present). https://www.aitsl.edu.au/docs/default-source/feedback/aitsl-learning-intentions-and-success-criteria-strategy.pdf?sfvrsn=382dec3c_2
[5] Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) 2009 to present. https://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Curriculum/ContentDescription/VCDSTC027
[6] Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[7] Lilburn, P. & Sullivan. P, (2017). Open-ended Maths Activities Revised Edition. Oxford.