Thepurpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the conceptions ofintegrated STEM education held by in-service science teachers through the useof Photo Elicitation Interviews (PEIs) and to examine how, if at all, those conceptions were reflected in teacher-createdintegrated STEM curricula that include an engineering design challenge. Ourfindings suggest that different conceptual models of integrated STEM held by teacherslead to different ways of creating, developing, and writing integrated STEMcurricula. Additionally, we found that the use of a STEM integration framework and a Framework forQuality K-12 Engineering Education, which guided the NSF-funded project andcontextualized this study, were also reflected in the teacher-createdcurricula. While the process of developing the curricula was not examined, ourfindings indicate that teacher conceptions of integrated STEM and theframeworks that guided the curriculum development process play a significantrole in what teachers decide to include and emphasize in units they create.
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Ring‐Whalen et al. (2018) studied this question.