The importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education to enhance students' critical thinking skill in facing the industry 4.0

Abstract

The industry 4.0 marks the fast-growing technology in many fields in order to achieve process efficiency in all of aspect of the industries, including education. The efficiency is derived from a big data, a real-time dataset collected from a vast amount of data from many instruments. Big data processing is used to predict market trends, discover new problem-solving and many more. Critical thinking, statistics, computing and the ability to understand how the world works are among important factors that has to be needed in big data processing. Among those abilities, critical thinking is an essential ability influencing directly the big data processing because this ability can aid students to decide the best alternative solutions in solving a problem. Nevertheless, the lack of good educational platform to host such important skills in the current Indonesian education makes it harder to cultivate good human resources that are able to comprehend big data processing. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is known to be the holistic educational approach that combines various disciplines into one set of educational approach to help students gain more skills and sharpen their knowledge in regards of the fast-growing industry 4.0 in Indonesia.