Collaboration between schools and higher education institutions in STEAM education

Problem

One of the goals of the “2021-2030 National Progress Program” is to transition to a sustainable economic development based on scientific knowledge, advanced technologies, and innovation, and to increase the country’s international competitiveness. The goal is that in 2030 the added value created by the life sciences sector would account for 5% of the total value added, the engineering industry sector – 7.69%, and the ICT sector – 9.3%. To achieve this, Lithuania needs competent STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) specialists. Therefore, it is important to strengthen STEAM education in schools and increase popularity of STEAM subjects.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), examining knowledge of 15-year-old students, showed that Lithuania is below OECD average in mathematics and science. Among 37 OECD countries, Lithuania ranks 26-31 in mathematical literacy and 25-27 in science literacy. Improving these results is one of the tasks assigned to the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport in the “2021-2030 National Progress Program”. Another important task is to improve the correspondence between the competences acquired in the education system and those required in the labour market. An important indicator for this is percentage of students in STEAM fields with Lithuania having a goal to have 33% of all students studying in such a field by 2030 (in 2018, there were 28.3%). However, popularity of STEAM-related study programs is not growing as fast as one would like. From people applying to study at universities only 6.1% choose natural sciences, mathematics, statistics as their priority. For information and communication technologies it is 8.2%, and for engineering, production and construction – 12.2% (data from 2022).

Taking these problems into consideration, in 2023, the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport started preparing a “2023-2030 STEAM education strengthening plan”. For this, one of the most important things is to analyse the interactions between participants of the STEAM ecosystem. This project aims to examine in detail one such interaction – collaboration between schools and higher education institutions.

Goal

The goal of the project is to investigate how to ensure a long-term, effective, and sustainable involvement of researchers and higher education institutions in STEAM education in schools.

Participants

2022/23

Dr. Edita Karosienė