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December 2014/January 2015 | Volume 72 | Number 4 STEM for All Pages 10-15
Jo Anne Vasquez
STEM education isn't just one thing—it's a range of strategies that help students apply concepts and skills from different disciplines to solve meaningful problems.
Everywhere you turn, STEMmania has set in. Most educators are familiar with the acronym, but many have questions: Why is STEM education important? Is it for all students, or just for math- and science-oriented students? Can it improve my teaching? Is this just one more add-on to my already packed curriculum?
The concept of STEM—for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—was introduced in the 1990s by the National Science Foundation. Not long after its introduction, we Americans learned that The World Is Flat (Friedman, 2005) and that our students were going to be left behind in the globally competitive marketplace because many other countries were out-STEMming us. Government and private funding began to flow toward all different types of STEM education programs, and today STEM has come to be recognized as a meta-discipline—an integration of formerly separate subjects into a new and coherent field of study.
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December 2014/January 2015STEM for All
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