Impact of Interdisciplinary STEM on Student Affect and Reasoning

Description: The Real STEM project focused on the development of interdisciplinary STEM experiences for students. The project was characterized by sustained professional development which was job-embedded, competency-based, and focused on the development of five STEM reasoning abilities within real-world contexts. The project promoted inclusion of tasks that drew on multiple STEM disciplines, embraced the use of authentic teaching strategies, and supported development of collaboration through interdisciplinary STEM professional learning communities and engaging STEM experts from the community. The four tenets of the project are presented and research on student impact is provided. The key findings are that the Real STEM project had a significant impact on student attitudes towards STEM, but marginal impact on improving students STEM reasoning