It is extremely difficult to maintain interest in an IQ-considered domain when the student is convinced of being ungifted. Hybrid scientific teaching that promotes using combined science, technology, engineering, and mathematics reasoning to resolve problems can be used jointly with epistemic inclusion (making students feel competent and encouraged to acquire and display their competence in their own manner) to arouse students' curiosity and interest. Indeed, those who are convinced of their own incompetency can excel once teachers break the scheme related to their reputation, proving to them that they are competent.
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The idea of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics used together to solve practical problems) comes from the identified problem of their segmentation in school programs. Since James Callaghan’s speech at Ruskin College in 1976, education has focused more on the beneficial connections between these disciplines and on finding better and more operational solutions, which not only enables society to operate but also prepares young people to secure their own economic wellbeing – likely to involve working to live instead of living to work (Pope, 2019). In many disciplines related to the infrastructure of homes and society (energy, telecommunication, water, travel); the design of cities, buildings, cars, clothes, machines, or projects; and their combinations, expertise is provided through collaboration among STEM experts (Smith, 2019). Thus, it could be more efficient for such collaboration to begin at school.
For a long time, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics were explicitly or implicitly saved for students who were supposed to be gifted in these domains. By contrast, STEM education emphasized the importance of developing this kind of this kind of skill set among all students, because of its relevance in everyday life regardless of students’ social-economic status, culture, gender, or reputation of being more or less gifted in those domains. For that reason, researchers in STEM education endeavor to engage girls in STEM (Caldwell, Grantham, & Smith, 2019) along with other populations that have formerly had no access to the STEM education.
To that end, researchers on STEM teaching focus on STEM literacy, which is an ability to understand modern debates about scientific and technological developments and their implications (Pope, 2019) and, Pope says, is considered crucial for full participation and responsible citizenship. More particularly, understanding of debates over scientific and technological developments enables students to make informed judgements and decisions across many domains concerned with analysis of risks and ethics. Teaching STEM by emphasizing connections between disciplines means going “beyond the teaching disciplines themselves” (Royal Society’s Vision Report, 2014, p. 26) and highlighting the contribution of this connection between individual subjects in the curriculum and the creation of wealth and a sustainable society.
Not only can epistemic inclusion be a promising way – based on the connections between the different disciplines to address everyday life issues – to develop the competence of STEM reasoning, but also, as the deficit of the need for affirmation does not need to be fulfilled, high-quality reasoning is exercised to focus on self-development rather than on a search for how to be good elsewhere.
Because epistemic inclusion insists on making students feel that they are part of a competent group, all efforts in the direction of the STEM approach are an inherent part of the research field on inclusion by competence. The question we raise is as follows: How can students’ interest in domains related to the reputation of being gifted be aroused?
For example, when a substitute teacher of physics wants to realize exciting scientific experiences in a low-level class with a reputation for being unruly and difficult, the students might be perplexed and think they are in the wrong class.