STEM outreach facilitation as a catalyst for 21st century teacher education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study provides an in-depth description of teacher candidates (TCs)’ experiences of their participation in a family-oriented science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) outreach event organized at a Canadian university. In the event, TCs facilitated mentally-engaging hands-on activities to the public as part of a General Science Secondary Methods course. The aim of the study is to further knowledge of the possible role of STEM outreach in teacher education programs, and to learn how this outreach experience impacts TCs’: a) pedagogical content knowledge (PCK); b) communication skills; c) motivation to teach STEM; and d) understanding of how STEM can be taught and learned effectively. This study is situated within a social-constructivist theoretical framework and employed an intrinsic case study methodology with a Partially Mixed Concurrent Dominant Status Design. Although the quantitative facet of the study was given less weight, it informed the analysis of the qualitative data. The data from the pre-event survey (n=29) revealed TCs’ passion for STEM as their greatest self-reported strength, whereas their lack of PCK was self-reported as their greatest limitation. Moreover, the participants predicted that activity facilitation at the event would enhance their teaching skills by allowing them to put their content knowledge into practice to facilitate visitors’ learning experiences. Furthermore, the findings from post-event focus group discussions (n=46) and individual interviews (n=9) indicated that this outreach experience enabled TCs to: a) expand pedagogical content knowledge; b) increase awareness of the role of effective communication on STEM teaching and learning; c) increase or reinforce appreciation of STEM hands-on activities for cognitive and affective reasons; d) enhance or strengthen understanding of the importance of parental engagement with children’s STEM education; and e) put in practice some of the theories learned in the teacher education program. Evidence of the above emerged through TCs’ engagement in the event preparation, activity facilitation at the event, and post-event reflections.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".