Pre-service mathematics teachers' perspectives on STEM-based learning activities

Abstract

As STEM education is the learning approach which involves integration from various subjects, ambiguity and differences in the interpretation of the process among the users from different subjective backgrounds can occur, particularly the pre-service teachers who have less experience in teaching. They shall implement this teaching approach with confident in teaching mathematics which is one of the subjects in STEM education, this research has focused on mathematics teachers' perspectives toward the STEM learning activities. The participants were 36 pre-service mathematics teachers in the academic year 2017. The research instrument used for collecting data was teacher reflective journals and lesson plans. The data was analyzed by content analysis, coding, generating themes and finding the associate frequency of pre-service mathematics teachers in each theme. The finding showed that most pre-service mathematics teachers learnt the concept of STEM education and could design learning activities based on STEM education. The difficulties in learning activities design were to create the integrated situations and to set the conditions related to engineering design processes. They wanted to revise their lesson plans to be more stressed in mathematical concepts and they still wondered if STEM education was suitable and applicable to every mathematical content.