Strategies of Teaching: Promoting Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education Through Cross-cutting Concepts

Abstract

Recently, the rapid development in science and technology has a tremendous impact on education system, resulting in a global change in education system. Unfortunately, such changes are not always accompanied with changes in the quality of education system. These conditions create problems toward the provision of decent education in science and technology among students. For example, the lack of understanding toward science and technology among elementary science teachers result in the lack of scientific experiments. These conditions need to be improved by raising the awareness of elementary teachers toward strategies to teach and learn science. The present study aims to investigate the promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) among pre-service teachers using cross-cutting concepts. The present study applied pre-experiment design method with one-shot case study to obtain the results. The results show that cross-cutting concepts seem beneficial to raise the awareness of pre-service elementary teachers toward science learning as well as the benefits of scientific experiment projects.