Developing competencies of natural science teachers for designing and organizing STEM education activities in Vietnam

Abstract

STEM education has gained attention in many countries around the world and is asserted to be of great importance in teaching at all school levels. In this research, the authors proposed a process for developing the capability to design and organize STEM activities in secondary schools for Natural Science Teachers (NSTs), teaching the basic topics integrated in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Earth Science contents according to the new secondary education program in Vietnam-2018. The research was carried out in three steps: (1) Professional training to improve NSTs ‘competence for understanding STEM education; (2) Designing assessment tools for the NSTs capability in designing and organizing STEM activities; (3) Assessing the NSTs’ capability using the tools. The research methodology was conducted with 122 Vietnamese NSTs to measure the pre-and post-intervention results. The findings revealed that the participants made significant progress in their teaching performances (the average points for their capability to design and organize STEM education increased from 1.58 to 2.33). This NSTs improvement can be seen as an excellent case study that will encourage other teachers to implement STEM education more frequently in Vietnamese schools contributing to building sustainable education systems.