STEM Education in Asia Pacific: Challenges and Development.

Abstract

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education has been viewed as foundational to economic growth by many countries in the world, and has thus received continuous attention from ministries of education. The existing reviews (Brown 2012; Mizell and Brown 2016) in the United States indicate that the research in STEM is growing, with integrative STEM constituting the largest in terms of subject matter investigated. K-12 students are also the most frequently researched student group. These reviews indicate that the research conducted so far has employed an equal spread of mixed, qualitative, and quantitative research. To gain further insights into the current emphasis on STEM education, a search on the Web of Science using the search term (“science technology engineering mathematics” OR “STEM”) was conducted on September 19, 2018. The search was limited to educational research. For the last 5 years (2013–2017), there are 662 published articles with an increasing trend. Within these 662 articles, we identified several important trends.