STEM

In the latest episode of our podcast series, The Research Files, we spoke with Dr Kathryn Ross about the gender bias evident in Australian high school science curricula. In this article, we speak with primary school STEM teacher Megan Hayes about how she ensures her students learn about the contributions of Australian female scientists in order to improve girls’ participation in STEM.

How many scientists are mentioned in high school science curricula in Australia and how many are women? After discovering that Marie Curie was absent from the radioactivity section of a state Physics syllabus, astrophysicist Dr Kathryn Ross set out to explore if the contributions of other women were being overlooked. She joins us on this episode to share the shocking findings.

The 2023 winners of the annual Australian STEM Video Game Challenge have just been announced. This year, students in years 4-12 created their own video games inspired by the theme ‘construction and destruction’. In this article, we share the winning entries.

In today’s episode of Teacher Staffroom, we’re going to be talking about teacher planning, drawing on 3 articles written by educational leader Michael Rosenbrock, as well as some of the other highlights from Teacher this month.

So far in a 3-part series on teacher planning, educational leader Michael Rosenbrock has looked at how teachers can pro-actively plan to tackle student misconceptions in STEM and support them to build and use their vocabulary in science and mathematics. In this final article, he explores how teachers can best plan to make effective use of manipulatives and representations to help students build understanding.

In our latest expert Q&A we talk to Kristy Osborne, a physicist, former pre-service teacher and Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) about the science concepts that primary students struggle with and why it’s important for teachers to identify and address student misconceptions early on.

‘Addressing the gender imbalance in digital technologies education and careers is an important goal. The research highlighted several areas where educators can contribute.’ Research from ACER for CSIRO has identified several factors that could support greater engagement of young women in digital technologies education. Find out more in this article.

‘Deliberately planning to support students to build and use their vocabulary is critical to ensuring that students can both access the curriculum content and effectively demonstrate their understanding.’ Educational leader Michael Rosenbrock shares what this might look like in practice for maths and science teachers.

‘Teacher knowledge of misconceptions and explicitly planning to uncover and address them is vital for supporting student learning growth.’ Educational leader Michael Rosenbrock looks at how teachers can pro-actively plan to tackle student misconceptions in STEM, and steps though an example from the forces and motion topic in physics.

In our latest reader submission, teacher Hannah Wiemers and researcher Dr Michelle Avila Vanderburg share details of a pilot program to create a 10-week curriculum unit allowing students to explore the use of drones in agriculture and gain more insight into careers in the industry.