About
Hands-On STEM Education
This degree was created to provide technical expertise and teacher education training leading to teacher certification in secondary schools. The goal: to improve the pipeline of people who will eventually work in STEM careers.
The Need
Highly-skilled, high-demand, higher-paying STEM jobs are the future and our workforce needs to have the knowledge and the skills to achieve in these employment areas.
The Trend
Schools need secondary teachers with strong STEM content knowledge and the ability to teach using project-based instruction to engage students in hands-on learning. Having knowledgeable teachers with deep content and technology background is imperative to inspire today's students to learn and achieve in STEM topics.
Because of low enrollment in math education programs, the supply of teacher candidates is not sufficient.
There is a nationwide trend to add STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) curriculum into schools as government and business look
toward the future workforce. With an expected addition of over 9 million STEM career jobs being added by 2022 (U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics) educators at all levels are realizing that students must be exposed to STEM content more than ever.
Currently, only an estimated 16 percent of U.S. high school students are proficient in mathematics and have an interest in STEM careers.
"The quality of math and science teachers is the most important single factor influencing whether students will succeed or fail in science, technology, engineering, and math."
- President Barack Obama