Perceptions of in-service teachers toward teaching STEM in Thailand

In this study, Thai in-service teachers had limited awareness about STEM education (14%). This reflects the need to improve mass and official communication about STEM education through pathways such as social networks and online.

The finding regarding teachers' concern about STEM disciplines indicates engineering is the highest concern. This is an interesting point, because many studies indicate the importance of engineering in STEM teaching, specifically that the nature of engineering design provides students with a systematic approach to solving problems that often occur in all of the STEM fields. Also, engineering design provides the opportunity to locate between the STEM disciplines, which has been identified as key to subject integration (Frykholm & Glasson, 2005; Barnett & Hodson, 2001). Thus, a lack of understanding engineering probably impacts the quality of STEM integration in education. Engineering is difficult for teachers for several reasons. In this study, few teachers were knowledgeable about engineering in STEM concepts. Additionally, engineering is quite new to teacher and it was not seriously addressed in the science and technology curriculum. Regarding Gess-Newsome’s notion, a teacher as a free agent has the opportunity to embrace, reject, or modify new knowledge, skills, and practices based on their perception and belief (Gess-newsome, 2015). Therefore, to enhance quality of teachers’ practices we must measure and track teachers' perceptions on STEM education and integration.

We explored that there is no significant difference between teachers' background (e.g, age, teaching assignment, experiences) and their perceptions of STEM education. We believe teachers in all categories shared the same level of knowledge because STEM education was only established in Thailand a couple of years ago. Additionally, we believe most teachers' perceptions of the satisfying impact STEM has on students' learning has possibly created and reinforced positive attitudes. However, many teachers-especially science and mathematics teachers-tend to be concerned about how well their subjects will integrate with other subjects.

Regarding a definition of STEM education, some participants (19%) did not have any idea what it meant. This indicates the irrelevance of awareness and understanding; although most of teachers had never heard about STEM education they knew about STEM from other routes and some could provide a definition for it. Similarly, Heiden et al. (2016) have tracked STEM awareness since 2012. They report that STEM awareness was quite low (26%) in the first year of evaluation then rising to 49% in 2016 through strategical efforts. Thus, if we systematically emphasize public awareness, especially in school, then the resulting trend will be the same. The findings on categories of STEM definition indicate that teachers hold uncertain views of STEM education. This can be considered an advantage or a disadvantage. It's an advantage in that STEM can be flexibly applied in several forms into classroom and may reduce teachers’ stress for enacting a new approach. It's a disadvantage in that teachers might suffer anxiety about STEM teaching due to uncertain views on the subject.

Similarly, teachers perceived STEM integration in many forms. This indicates that STEM can be used with different events and strategies. Some teachers may use technology or engineering design as the core of learning (Guzey, 2012), while some teachers view STEM as a problem-based learning activity grounded in the theoretical background of constructivism, where students are engaged in the diverse components of problem solving (Capraro & Slough, 2008; Clark & Ernst, 2007). However, teachers are required to understand and process STEM content in order to scaffold students’ STEM learning and develop STEM literacy with regards to students' awareness and future skills.

In addition, teachers did not have a consensus about the integration model. This can be interpreted in two ways. The first is our given STEM-integration model represents all possible STEM-concepts integration. The second is that teachers might not understand well enough to conceptualize an integration model. However, we believe when teachers gain more STEM teaching experiences, they might come up with more ideas about integration.