Women and STEM Education in Nigeria: Progress, Shortcomings, Challenges, and Way Forward

Literature

STEM was once referred as Science, Technology and Society (STS) in the distant past (Badmus, 2018). The acronym STEM was introduced in 2001 by Scientific Administrators at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) (Sanders, 2009). The organization previously used the acronym SMET (Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology) when referring to the career fields in those disciplines or a curriculum that integrated knowledge and skills from those fields. This has been transformed to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics) education today by popular agitations by researcher and educators (Taylor, 2016). STEAM aims to provide students with the best-rounded education to prepare them for the challenges of the 21^st century. In fact, STEAM takes STEM to the next level. STEAM approach would provide students with critical thinking skill that promotes creative problem solving that would provide qualitative workforce for self-reliance. The perception of researchers on STEM education is that its student would benefit after post-secondary education and would benefit more at the tertiary education level (Butz, Kelly, Adamson, Bloom, Fossum and Gross, 2004).