STEAM competencies and attitudes in higher education: the evaluation of experts

Abstract

The integrative trend of STEAM education allows for shaping an innovative, motivating, and enriching teaching and learning practice in the classroom. Currently, there is a wide repertoire of research on the effectiveness of educational practices based on this approach, however, at the national level, there is a lack of validated instruments that allow inquiring about the development of STEAM skills and attitudes in higher education. In this sense, this study's purpose consisted of designing and validating two socio-formative rubrics that address STEAM competencies and attitudes in both teachers and higher education students in Mexico. To do this, first a literature review was carried out, where the dimensions, items and descriptors of interest were identified; second, once the instrument was finalized, it was submitted for review by experts in STEAM, education, pedagogy, or didactics area; and finally, based on their judgment, the relevance of the items was calculated using Aiken's V coefficient and the 95% confidence intervals were estimated. In total, 16 researchers participated worldwide and the results show that the quantitative evaluation was quite positive, finding that the validity of the content had mostly scores above the expected value (0.80) in terms of relevance, writing, and coherence, in a way that Two pertinent instruments are presented that will make it possible to diagnose STEAM competencies and attitudes in national and international universities.