Background: The concept of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) capital can serve as a framework for understanding how various resources contribute to aspiration formation in STEM fields. However, to date, it remains unclear what factors should be included in STEM capital and how they may help explain why students do or do not aspire to STEM careers. Purpose: This study aimed to validate the instruments and explore the predictive effect of various factors, including STEM capital and other non-STEM specific cultural capital factors, on students’ STEM aspirations while comparing these variables among primary, junior secondary, and senior secondary levels. Sample: A stratified sample of students (N = 3,991) from the upper-primary to senior-secondary level in Hong Kong participated in the study. Design and methods: An online survey investigation was conducted for data collection. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed to validate the instruments before ANOVA, correlation analysis, and regression analysis were performed. Results: The elementary students had significantly greater scores on the STEM capital variables than did the students at the junior and senior secondary levels. Gender, age, parental school involvement and expectations, informal STEM participation, positive views of professionals, and self-concept in mathematics positively predicted STEM aspirations, while having a parent/guardian with a STEM career negatively predicted students’ aspirations. In addition, the results showed that having STEM books at home and self-concept in information technology were additional predictors at some educational levels. The explored factors can explain approximately 30% of the variance in students’ STEM aspirations. Conclusion: Senior students’ STEM capital factors exhibit lower levels compared to their younger peers. The developed, adapted, and translated instruments are valid for measuring the factors composing STEM capital, where some

In this editorial, we discuss the affordances and challenges of emerging technologies in designing and implementing STEM education as a planned theme of this special issue. We view that emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality, have a double-edged sword effect on STEM learning and teaching. Exploring the effect will help provide a balanced view that simultaneously recognizes the benefits and pitfalls of the technologies and avoids overstating either one. This themed issue highlights how immersive and AI-driven learning environments advance and transform STEM education in different contexts. It consists of this editorial, three research reviews, and two empirical research articles contributed by scholars from five different regions, including Australia, Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore, and the USA. They discussed the educational, social, and technological effects of emerging technologies. Each article discusses to various extent about the current research status, what and how the technologies can afford, and what concerns the technologies may bring to STEM education. © The Author(s), 2023.

This paper reports a design and implementation of a STEM enrichment programme infused with affective elements designed for Hong Kong students. Specifically, it features a design-thinking approach to develop solutions to a self-selected problem addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Around 30 upper primary school (grades 5 to 6) and 20 lower secondary students (grades 7 to 10) enrolled in the study. Considering empathy as a core value of the design-thinking process and aligned with affective dimensions of thinking and learning, we investigate students' design-thinking development and STEM learning processes while highlighting empathy map as a pedagogical tool. We discuss the implications and insights of offering humanistic perspectives on STEM curricular design, especially for K-12 students. Our results showed that students at different age range were able to use empathy maps to devise designs effectively, despite their varying degrees of empathy. Furthermore, we conceptualize empathy maps as a pedagogical tool that creates physical boundaries in design thinking, making students' mental transitions across design stages more explicit. This study contributes to a better understanding of the educational potentials of design-thinking enhanced classrooms, with the results informing theoretical and practical advice on the integration of the empathy map in innovation-oriented projects. Copyright ©2023 Springer.

In Society 5.0, Education 5.0 enables economic development with the resolution of social problems through advanced technologies and manages technological power appropriately in terms of a humanistic perspective. Education 5.0 is a future education model aiming to encourage student ownership to form a contemporary student-participatory curriculum with teacher mentoring. While STEM education as an Education 5.0 enabler is the key to realizing Industry 5.0 to personalize and rehumanize the manufacturing process, this paper will look at the need to better align secondary STEM education with Vocational and Professional Education and Training (VPET) initiative by transdisciplinary integration to facilitate Hong Kong better transiting to Industry 5.0. The objective is to examine the secondary STEM education development and its potential role and benefits of creating a foundation of transdisciplinary STEM secondary education in overcoming the current shortcomings of the vertical division of academic disciplines. It seeks to restore the VPET nature in the STEM scholarship and emanate from the secondary STEM curriculum renovations and transformations to tackle social and economic challenges, so the processes of STEM pedagogy will be changed significantly to adapt humanization empowerment by adjusting the methods and approaches to achieve new industrialization and help align with the call of Education 5.0 in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

STEM education has taken on high importance in Hong Kong K-12 education landscape. Despite policy advocacy and curriculum endeavour, the quality of STEM education varies significantly between schools. Research literature indicates that high-quality STEM education requires teachers’ rigorous delivery of topics and appropriate pedagogies, and one approach to improve such practices is teacher professional development (TPD). However, because current research on TPD has not given explicit consideration to the complex nature of STEM education, there remains a lack of a clear blueprint of how TPD should be conducted to build teachers’ capacity for STEM education effectively. This paper presents a case study that explores the necessary attributes and identifies the missing links of STEM education TPD by understanding how various TPD models supported a Hong Kong K-12 school embracing STEM education. Qualitative data collection methods, including semi-structured interviews and classroom observations, were employed to draw a picture of TPD implementations in the selected school. The findings suggest that, at the macro-level, effective STEM TPD should not stop at employing mixed use of TPD models; the models have to be integrated organically with respect to a school-based STEM curriculum implementation approach. A collaborative culture between teachers must be cultivated for effective inter-disciplinary integration. Collaborative action research should also be promoted to develop collective wisdom of STEM pedagogies. At the micro-level, TPACK and cross-disciplinary integration skills need to be focusing areas of STEM TPD. With these guiding principles, some possible strategies for effective STEM education TPD are suggested. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Background Despite the focus of many global education systems on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, research on teachers' concerns about this relatively new educational phenomenon remains scarce. Purpose This study used the concerns-based adoption model as the theoretical framework to examine the primary concerns expressed by teachers about STEM education and identified a typology of teachers based on the response patterns of their concerns. Sample A regionally representative sample of 331 primary and secondary school teachers of STEM-related subjects in Hong Kong participated in this study. Design and methods Data were collected from the teachers through an online, self-reported survey. Latent class analysis was used to profile teachers' concerns about STEM education in this study, and multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed to regress the latent class outcome variable on the covariates. Results The majority of the teachers reported high levels of concern at all five stages of STEM education implementation, namely evaluation, information, management, consequence, and refocusing. Latent class analysis revealed three classes of teachers who were extremely concerned (49.1%), considerably concerned (43.5%), or moderately concerned (7.4%) about STEM education. Multinomial logistic regression analysis indicated that the teaching sector (primary or secondary) and participation in STEM education training significantly contributed to the prediction of the latent class outcome variable. Conclusion Given that 96% of the teachers in this study were trained in STEM education through workshops, seminars, courses, and trips, these findings highlight the necessity of designing personalized professional learning experiences for teachers and provide empirically supported evidence to indicate teachers' preparedness and readiness to adopt STEM education as an educational innovation and directions for future research in related areas. This

This article begins with a historical overview of the STEM education policy and related classroom practices in Hong Kong. Against the backdrop that the Hong Kong education authority has been promoting STEM education over the past few years, there has been a pressing need for effective strategies of implementing STEM education in the context of reduced class size classrooms (i.e. small class teaching). With a view to addressing this need, this article strives to exemplify the incorporation of STEM education into small class teaching settings. Intended as a conceptual paper drawing on design approaches for STEM lessons and a small class teaching framework, the article demonstrates the relevance of STEM education to small class teaching. Two illustrative lesson design examples are provided to showcase how the design approaches and framework can be operationalised. In addition, the article also offers a thoughtful discussion concerning the potential challenges of delivering the two sample lessons as well as the coping strategies. It contributes to understanding of STEM education theories and provides a valuable reference for educational practitioners. Copyright © 2022 Springer.

In many disciplines of STEM education, online experiments (OEs), commonly called remote-controlled experiments, become an emerging practice in technology-enhanced learning because of their many merits perceived in educational research. We recently formulated an innovative, low-cost, and open-source approach to developing new OEs rapidly. It won a gold medal and a special prize in an international innovation and invention competition in 2018. Using this new approach, teachers and students can easily access OEs with a lightweight web browser using any hardware and any operating system without installing additional software or apps. They can observe and/or control the experiments and collect authentic data (over a very short or long time) for further analysis by plotting graphs and/or conducting calculations to obtain important results. Some well-accepted instructional approaches or pedagogies have been integrated into online science/STEM experiments, which can also be aligned with school-based curricula to provide self-contained courseware for students’ online self-regulated learning. In this chapter, we will focus on whether OEs could really and effectively provide the essential elements of experimental learning to ‘school students’ as expected in traditional laboratory work. From our pilot implementation in four Hong Kong (HK) and Mainland China (CHINA) secondary schools with a total of 172 participants, we explored the OE experiences of different experiments and cognitive performance among students from different regions and genders using the conventional mixed methods research and design-based research. Students’ feedback and suggestions for improvement of the OEs were also analysed together with some specific implications for science/STEM education. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

To enhance understanding of factors that may improve students’ STEM career participation, we explored Hong Kong secondary students’ self-perceptions of STEM subjects and career interests using the STEM Semantic Survey and Career Interest Survey questionnaire. Results showed that most students thought technology was more appealing than science, mathematics, and engineering subjects. Science was the only subject in which male and female students showed similar attitudes. A gender gap was found in these students’ career interests in STEM. Students held a neutral to mildly positive stance toward a career related to science, technology, and mathematics but had the least interest in a career related to engineering. Males showed more interest than females in careers related to all four subject areas. Results revealed a need to stimulate students’ interest in STEM education and search for ways to make a connection between STEM subjects and future careers through STEM teaching in the classroom. More attention should be paid to encouraging girls to engage in STEM-related activities. Copyright © 2022 Technology Education Program, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Mathematical modeling is considered a bridge to STEM education and has been incorporated into K–12 mathematics curriculums in various countries. However, it has a relatively short history in Hong Kong schools. The lack of high-quality, relevant exemplars of mathematical modeling activities is a challenge to teacher practice in this area. Hence, this study aims to establish a design framework for mathematical modeling activities suitable for teachers and students in Hong Kong. We explore the design and content of the official mathematical modeling exemplars published by the Hong Kong Education Bureau using a document analysis approach. The findings provide the basis for developing a framework to be used in the future design of mathematical modeling activities. Four exemplars were found and analyzed in terms of their structural components, level of learning experience in mathematical modeling, and design characteristics. Based on our findings, we discussed various strategies to enhance the design of a mathematical modeling activity, including setting diversified learning objectives, cross-subject collaboration when formulating the problem context and instructions, designing more activities suitable for average and underperforming students, emphasizing the evaluation of modeling outcomes, and providing relevant supporting materials. Our study thus lays the groundwork for advancing the teaching and learning of mathematical modeling in school contexts. Copyright © 2022 by the authors.