Design and validation of a rubric for the evaluation of STEM teaching proposals (RubeSTEM)

Abstract

This article had two main objectives: (1) the design, development and validation of a rubric to evaluate the quality of didactic proposals with a STEM approach; and (2) its application in a sample of training teachers’ productions. To do this, we start from a theoretical framework that shows the antecedents and our positioning in the STEM issue, also reviewing other research related to the previous objectives. For this, a content and expert validation process was followed, applying the rubric thus obtained (RubeSTEM) to a sample of 26 group assignments of students who had followed a previous training period. The analysis of the results obtained includes the descriptive statistics of the evaluation of the proposals based on the RubeSTEM indicators and, through a qualitative analysis, a series of difficulties were extracted that presented a certain recurrence when the students faced the challenge of designing a didactic proposal based on the STEM approach. From there we outline some possible explanatory hypotheses for these difficulties. It is noteworthy that only a minimal part of the proposals meets acceptable requirements, finally proposing some initiatives that we believe are necessary to respond to these results and that focus mainly on teacher training (initial and continuous).