The second National STEM Education Research Summit was held at NC State’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation Thursday, Oct. 10. This forum was a national-level convention of faculty engaged in STEM education and researchers working on the integration of multiple disciplines of STEM education in K-12 and higher learning.
This summit is the brainchild of Carla C. Johnson, executive director of the Friday Institute and associate dean of the College of Education. Before joining NC State, Johnson was the associate dean for research, engagement and global affairs at Purdue University. Johnson said she helped organized the first National STEM Education Summit at Purdue in 2017. After joining the Friday Institute in June 2019, Johnson said she decided to host the second summit closer to home at NC State.
“I was selected to become the executive director of the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation on campus here at NC State and also the associate dean in the College of Education,” Johnson said. “Rather than going back to Purdue to host it, it seemed like a great fit to be able to do it here at NC State, given the investments in STEM on campus, the great programs we have and research, and then Centennial Campus and the Friday Institute is a great setting to hold a convening of this size.”
Researchers attended from various institutes across the country, including East Carolina University, University at Buffalo, Rutgers University, Purdue University and Washington State University, amongst many others.
Arlo Caine, a professor of mathematics at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and Kathleen Roth, a science education researcher at Cal Poly Pomona, said they were eager to travel across the country to attend this summit at State and discuss their findings with other researchers.
“Dr. Kathleen Roth and I are involved in a 5-year project funded by the NSF to scale up and study professional development programs for science education in the elementary level,” Caine said. “The summit is gathering people from around the country, and Dr. Roth and I are here to share the results of that project and on how to integrate disciplines.”
While the presenters talked about multiple topics related to STEM education, the main focus was on integrating different educational practices and disciplines. Eric Wiebe, a professor of STEM education in the College of Education, talked about his work in computational thinking.
“It [computational thinking] is trying to take inspiration from the work that computer scientists do; not necessarily learning specific programming languages, but the way they go about doing their work,” Wiebe said. “If you graduate with a science degree in chemistry, you are not going to go to some lab and sit there and mix chemicals all day; you are going to be modelling and simulating chemical reactions using computational tools on computers. So, in order to prepare our future workforce in these STEM areas, they have to be computationally literate.”
In addition to the regular research sessions, there was an interactive poster session with eight different posters being shared and presented. Changzhao Wang, a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Miami, talked about why she decided to work in STEM education and how important it is not to let the “science spirit” die away in the face of tests and traditional learning.
“Over the past year, I have been working with my adviser on a literature review of integrating computational thinking in STEM education,” Wang said. “I majored in physics when I was an undergrad, and I have a passion for physics, but I do have a passion for physics education and more broadly, science education. I like teaching kids to learn science in a proper way.”
Johnson also said NC State will host a third STEM Education Research Summit in 2020.
Readers interested in learning about the summit and the Friday Institute can visit their website for more information.
