STEM Approach as a Means for Students’ Science Learning

Resumo

This article aims to describe the outcomes of a STEM project implemented in five different school clusters. It involved the delivery of STEM curriculum projects and its bottom line was the contextualization of the curriculum to the students’ reality (i.e., it aimed to increase the comprehension of scientific phenomena and the science knowledge to provide a sense to local and global realities). The study aims to describe the students’ learning during the development of the project. The research reported in this study is qualitative, adopting an interpretative orientation. Participants were 1097 students belonging to five school clusters from distinct regions of Portugal. The students came from 52 different primary classrooms (n=941), mostly from Year 3 and Year 4, and 9 lower secondary classrooms (n=156), aged between 8 and 15 years-old. Due to the diversity of school clusters and local contexts, the curriculum projects had many differences, even though they were based in the same curriculum matrix. The data sources used in this study were group interviews and written documents. The results showed that all curriculum projects allowed students to have positive learning experiences and to develop a significant number of competencies. Namely, they mobilize specific scientific knowledge related to the developed activities, as well as transversal competencies such as, formulate questions, appreciate, justify and evaluate different perspectives, plan and deliver an investigation, communicate findings to their classmates and the community, in order to create awareness to social problems and acting in and with the community.