Early stem education: practice and prospects

This Special Issue presents a perspective on the early years and science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. It explores this subject from both the child and adult’s perspectives. There can still be an assumption that we can improve things by working with secondary children, however, the reality is that if we want children to aspire we need to get to them when they are young. Croll, Attwood, and Fuller (2010) demonstrate in their research that children do have aspirations and at an earlier age than we think and that schools do need to have relevance to each and every child. Therefore, it is incumbent on all schooling to ensure the experience is relevant to all children to give them the best possible chance in life and the greatest interest in subjects such as science. We talk about equality, equity and justice a lot these days, what we need to ensure is that everyone gets the support they need to achieve what they wish to, within the dynamic of a society. This series brings together research for the most part focused on actual practice in classrooms.

STEM education covers four board disciplines, but ones that so obviously embraces the world and you can experience them inside and outside! And they are all by their very nature very experiential disciplines, hence an emphasis in these papers on play and exploration. You have to get your hands dirty doing STEM education. However, there are also examples of studies within this series which also explore the more teacher-led approach to science and the impact of this on young children’s attitudes and knowledge.

Emma Williams and Nicola Turner offer us a real lived experience of the children in their nursery school doing science, in the form of things such as memory books, the mud kitchen, through adult-led scientific enquiry and looking at scientific understanding through conversations. They bring to life science happening now and how they have adapted to develop scientific thinking and behaviours, linking theory and practice.

Helen Bilton presents research undertaken with early years teachers looking, in particular, at their own experiences of playing outside when a child and then their own knowledge through training and into their first jobs of outdoor learning. Some fascinating insights are shared about what some of our teachers got up to outside when young! But a more serious note suggests that there may be a link between offering good quality outdoor provision for young children and the staff’s own childhood experience of this.

Mike Watts and Saima Samejee’s paper develops Bilton’s ideas by drawing attention to the possible link between early knowledge and experience of science and eventual science literacy. They note that the knowledge a teacher has will impact what they can teach and that sometimes they may need a ‘helicopter’ view. They illustrate their discussion through materials – blocks and plastic.

Nalda Wainwright, Jackie Goodway, Margaret Whitehead, Andy Williams and David Kirk focus on a project looking at the three- year study of the implementation of the foundation phase in Wales. This paper uses observations of children, field notes and video to analyse the importance of play in a child’s learning and suggest that children’s perception of whether something is play or work can influence their motivation to engage in a task. Importantly STEM education needs to be taught through play and not as a discreet subject as the motivation of the child may be lost.

This is thoughtfully followed by a paper from Sue Tunncliffe and Eirini Gkouskou who observe children at play and identify the scientific concepts being played out. They offer reflections of these observations and link explicitly the actions to scientific concepts and the science happening in action. This is a useful reminder of how much science really is happening with young children.

Sara Pereira, Maria Escola and Rui Marques pick up on the Watts and Salehjee focus and the global priority of a need to have scientifically literature adults and children. They offer their findings through the study of children partaking of a lotto game using didactic strategies. Through this study one can see the unfolding of the children’s thinking as they partake of the game. It indicates that young children are quite capable of reaching conclusions, explaining relationships and constructing knowledge.

The final paper by Saima Salehjee explores Enquiry Based Learning to aid the teaching of science, a subject the author argues is one which many staff find challenging as they lack subject knowledge. This model is explored through real scenarios of children’s stories and documents what the science of each book is and how to structure a lesson to draw the science effectively from the source.