Winberg, C. et al. (2018).

Learning to teach STEM disciplines in higher education: a critical

review of the literature.
Teaching in Higher Education, 2018.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1517735

Learning to teach STEM disciplines in higher education: a critical

review of the literature

Christine Winberg, Hanelie Adendorff, Vivienne Bozalek, Honjiswa Conana, Nicola Pallitt,
Karin Wolff, Thomas Olsson and Torgny Roxå

Abstract
Enrolments in STEM disciplines at universities are increasing globally, attributed to the
greater life opportunities open to students as a result of a STEM education. But while
institutional access to STEM programmes is widening, the retention and success of STEM
undergraduate students remains a challenge. Pedagogies that support student success are
well known; what we know less about is how university teachers acquire pedagogical
competence. This is the focus of this critical review of the literature that offers a theorised
critique of educational development in STEM contexts. We studied the research literature
with a view to uncovering the principles that inform professional development in STEM
disciplines and fields. The key finding of this critical review is how little focus there is on the
STEM disciplines. The majority of studies reviewed did not address the key issue of what
makes the STEM disciplines difficult to learn and challenging to teach.

Introduction: the increasing importance of the STEM disciplines and fields

The term ‘STEM’ (an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics) was
coined by the National Science Foundation in the 1990s as national governments became
increasingly aware of the importance of this cluster of disciplines for economic growth
(Bybee 2010). Enrolments in STEM disciplines at universities are increasing globally,
attributed to the greater life opportunities open to students as a result of a STEM
education, as well as increasing financial and academic support for students
undertaking undergraduate STEM studies. But while formal access to STEM programmes
is increasing (i.e. more students are accepted onto STEM programmes), the retention
and success of STEM undergraduate students has not significantly increased (Sithole
et al. 2017). There is general consensus in the international literature that
undergraduate STEM programmes pose significant challenges to students and that many
STEM programmes are marred by high attrition rates, poor student success, and a notable
lack of diversity (Killpack and Melón 2016). While the difficulties of mastering STEM
knowledge are recognised, there is also growing recognition that students’ ‘epistemological
access’ (Morrow 2009) to STEM disciplines is strongly supported when the academics who
teach on them are pedagogically competent to do so (Tenenberg and McCartney 2010).

University of the Western Cape Research Repository [email protected]

The educational philosopher, Wally Morrow coined the term ‘epistemological access’
(Morrow 2009) to distinguish between a student’s admission into a higher education
programme and the student’s acquisition of the knowledge and literacies of that
programme. By the term, he meant that the admission of students to programmes
(particularly students who through economic or social disadvantage were underprepared
for higher education) required considerable effort on the part of both the students and the
academics who taught them. Morrow (2009) strongly supported the widening of access to
higher education, but was concerned that university teachers should understand their
roles in providing epistemological access to their disciplines and fields. Morrow’s
concerns raise warning bells for STEM faculties and departments who have
significantly increased their student numbers over the past years. Accepting those
who were previously excluded from STEM disciplines and fields into higher education
is not enough; STEM academics also need to enable students’ epistemological access.

Prior research has built a knowledge base of the kinds of undergraduate STEM
pedagogies that might provide epistemological access, such as thinking through problems
with peers (Watkins and Mazur 2013), the use of authentic real-world environments
and examples’ (Nerland and Jensen 2014), making more ‘visible’ STEM discourses,
particularly with regard to assessment practices (Wolff and Hoffman 2014), socially
inclusive pedagogies (Killpack and Melón 2016) and the ‘mainstreaming’ of student
support mechanisms, such as academic and technical literacies (Shay, Wolff, and
Clarence-Fincham 2016). The effectiveness of these pedagogies for undergraduate
STEM student success has been verified through systematic reviews of the research
literature (e.g. Savelsbergh et al. 2016). What we know less about, however, is how
university teachers in the STEM disciplines learn to teach their subjects. The overarching
question guiding this critical study of the literature is: what kinds of professional learning
interventions support university teachers’ acquisition of systematic pedagogical STEM
knowledge?

Who trains university STEM teachers?

Teaching and learning centres have varied histories and trajectories, ‘pulling together
specialists from areas such as applied language studies, adult education, science
education, engineering education and educational technology who care deeply about
students and are committed to the improvement of their experience as learners in higher
education’ (Shay 2012, 314). Academic developers typically come from a wide variety of
home disciplines, but are united by their deep interest in student learning. The first
academic developers in New Zealand ‘were well-qualified academics from “respectable”
disciplines … perceived as having the authority to speak in the university’ (Barrow and
Grant 2012, 469). Many teaching and learning centres continue to be located in
faculties, such as the Academic Development Unit in the Faculty of Engineering at Lund
University (Olsson and Roxå 2012). But many teaching and learning centres
developed outside of faculties, from ‘central services such as registry, human resources,
or library and information services’ (Gosling 2009). Some grew out of student
counselling centres, with a focus study skills and the promotion of student well-being

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(Walsh 2017). In their study of nine higher education institutions, Henderson, Beach, and
Finkelstein (2011) found that the main providers of educational training to STEM
academics were situated in teaching and learning centres outside of faculties with the
mission to provide professional development for all instructors at the institutions; they
thus provided generic pedagogical training.

The logic behind the training of STEM academics by non-STEM academic developers is that
university teachers, as disciplinary experts, are well versed in the logic of their disciplines
(Walsh 2017). Thus the focus of their professional learning should be pedagogy, not STEM.
To a certain extent this makes sense, as the logic of teaching STEM subjects (i.e. STEM
pedagogy) does not always have the same logic as STEM disciplinary logic. There
are, however, studies that show that STEM content and STEM pedagogy are closely
connected, and that STEM pedagogical development should be understood as an
interdisciplinary project (Henderson, Beach, and Finkelstein 2011). A well-known
example of the interdisciplinary base of teaching is the concept of ‘pedagogical content
knowledge’ (PCK) (Shulman 1992), that is, the idea that teachers require disciplinary
knowledge as well as pedagogical knowledge in order to teach. ‘Constructive alignment’
(Biggs and Tang 2011), the social constructivist version of this framework, is more
common in higher education, but is not equivalent because it under-specifies the
disciplinary knowledge base of what is to be taught. Trowler and Cooper (2002) point
out that where there is a ‘mismatch between the rules of appropriateness which
predominate in an educational development programme and those held by a
participant, we can expect trouble’ (2002, 9). Teaching methods and assessment tasks
proposed by academic developers may be rejected out of hand as ‘belonging to a regime of
teaching and learning that resides in the Social Sciences and therefore inappropriate
to … Science disciplines’ (Trowler and Cooper 2002, 17).

Because the scientific knowledge structures of STEM disciplines are complex and
specialised, undergraduate students generally do not bring their own understandings of
scientific disciplines to their university studies. Indeed, the acquisition of science
knowledge is a lengthy process that requires both subject knowledge and training in how
this knowledge is structured. It is for these reasons that STEM university teachers
usually teach significant amounts of subject content in their classroom and laboratory
practice. The ‘lecture-demonstration’ is thus a ‘signature pedagogy’ (Shulman 2005) of
many STEM disciplines and fields.

There are, however, significant counter-traditions in the teaching of STEM disciplines,

based on the idea that teachers’ ‘craft knowledge’ (Van Driel et al. 1997) is acquired
through reflection on practice. In professional development, this is often explored
through teaching portfolios (Seldin, Miller, and Seldin 2010); but has also been reduced
to ‘what works’ or ‘tips and tricks’ (Clarke and Boud 2016) in academic development
workshops. More radical approaches to the teaching of STEM disciplines at university
are emerging and have been influenced by socio-political contexts, the exclusion or low
representation of black and non-traditional students in STEM disciplines (Killpack and

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Melón 2016), the ‘decolonial turn’ in STEM teaching (de Oliveira Andreotti et al.
2015), and the biographies of STEM teachers and students (Jita 2004). These different
understandings of the teaching and learning relationship lend themselves to a wide variety
of pedagogical approaches.

A theoretical framework for critically reviewing the STEM pedagogical literature

Because we understand STEM pedagogical training to be underpinned by both STEM
disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, we conceptually framed our
research with Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), a social realist framework that has been
widely used to study teaching and learning in higher education (Maton 2014; Maton,
Hood, and Shay 2015). LCT offers many ‘tools’ for the analysis of knowledge practices; in
this review of the literature we drew on the dimension of Specialisation (Maton 2014)
to analyse the ways in which the research literature understands the professional
learning of university teachers towards competent STEM pedagogical practice.
Specialization is based on the understanding that ‘practices and beliefs are about or
oriented towards something and by someone’ (Maton 2014, 29). Maton argues that it is
possible to distinguish between the ‘epistemic relations between practices and their
focus’ (in this case, teaching STEM content knowledge) and the ‘social relations between
practices and their subjects’ (in this case, pedagogy or the teaching and learning
relationship). The LCT dimension of Specialization provided a means by which we could
analyse the knowledge that under pins practices in STEM pedagogical training, as well as
practitioners’ orientations and dispositions towards the knowledge base of their practice.

The Specialization dimension explains knowledge claims and knowledge practices as

always involving both knowledge and knowers, and thus relations to knowledge (i.e.
epistemic relations) and relations to knowers and their practices (i.e. social relations).
Together, the relative strengths of the two relations give rise to a series of Specialization
codes, which encapsulate the basis of legitimation and achievement in the particular field,
situation or event. The particular configurations that these relations could take in the
training of STEM educators will vary along a continuum of strengths (Maton 2014), that
is, some forms of STEM pedagogical training are likely to relate more strongly to the
STEM discipline, and other forms of training are likely to relate more strongly to the
social aspects of the teaching and learning relationship – with many possible combinations
and hybrids. The Specialization dimension allowed us to locate each of the studies in the
systematic review within a range of positions that practitioners might see as legitimate
within STEM pedagogy, instead of forcing false dichotomies such as ‘teacher-centred’ or
‘learner-centred’ practices. As Maton explains: ‘The codes are not ideal types – they
conceptualise organising principles rather than gather empirical characteristics’ (2014,
33). The many possible combinations could be understood as located within the
Specialization plane in which the x-axis represents a continuum of weaker to stronger
social relations, and the y-axis represents weaker to stronger epistemic relations Figure 1.

The relative strength of epistemic relations and social relations give rise to four principal
codes, located across the quadrants of the Specialization plane. Studies located in quadrant

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1 would focus on the training of academic staff in STEM knowledge (an unlikely
scenario); studies located in quadrant 2 would focus on STEM pedagogical content
knowledge. Studies located in quadrant 3 would focus only on generic pedagogical
training, while studies located in quadrant 4 (the undesirable minus/minus quadrant)
would have little or no STEM content and little or no pedagogical knowledge. Both top
quadrants (1 and 2) have stronger epistemic relations to STEM knowledge, but studies located
in quadrant 2, where there are stronger relations to STEM knowledge and stronger relations
to pedagogical knowledge are more likely to provide academic staff with the kind of training
that might provide support students’ epistemological access to the STEM disciplines and
fields.

The four basic codes provide a means of answering questions such as ‘what is the
knowledge base that is drawn on in this study?’; these codes thus helped us to uncover the
underpinning logic of pedagogical training, that is, whether the pedagogical training
addressed key issues within the discipline (e.g. its key concepts, procedures and practices) or
whether the training was more focused on the social dimensions of pedagogy (e.g. presentation
skills, classroom management). By examining these organising principles, we could make
more explicit the knowledge underpinning STEM pedagogical training. Thus we used the
Specialization plane as a framework to account for and reveal the underlying orientations that
motivated the academic development practitioners to make particular choices.
Specialization codes uncover the principles of what counts as legitimate knowledge and
legitimate ways of knowing. These act to regulate and maintain knowledge and the processes,
procedures and dispositions within practices.

In summary, the ‘practice’ in this literature review is learning how to teach in STEM
disciplines. Epistemic relations in the professional development of STEM academics
describe stronger or weaker STEM disciplinary content along a continuum, from high
levels of STEM content to little or no STEM content. Social relations in the professional
development of STEM academics reveal stronger or weaker forms of STEM pedagogical

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knowledge along a continuum, from pedagogies that are highly appropriate to the STEM
discipline, to those that are less appropriate, as in Table 1.

Methodology of the systematic review

The search strategy, firstly, required the development of appropriate search terms. These
terms were refined through initial pilot searches. The international literature has many
ways of describing the professional learning of academic staff in their roles as university
teachers – thus a full spectrum of such terms was required (e.g. ‘academic development’,
‘educational development’, ‘faculty development’, ‘professional development’). As STEM is
a term more commonly used at the school level than in higher education, we excluded
school level studies in the searches. When we searched in general academic development
journals we included: ‘Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics’, but when searching
in STEM education journals this was not necessary as a search term. We searched eight
academic databases and cross-checked the search within 17 individual journals.

We also searched journals that were not linked to academic data-bases. Table 2 provides a
schematic representation of the search strategy. The application of the search strategy resulted
in an initial data-base of 144 articles, book chapters and conference proceedings. All items in
the data-base were read and articles that were not relevant to the topic, or that were
‘opinion pieces’ rather than empirical research or evaluation studies, or very short
papers (i.e. shorter than 2 pages) were excluded, resulting in a final data-base of 77
studies. The data-base is available at https://sites.google.com/site/stempedagogy/critical-
review-1.

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The data base included a wide varied of research studies, with much of the literature
reporting on evaluations of professional learning interventions. Many of these interventions
were innovative, and had the intention to move away from the ‘traditional workshop format’
of academic development (Beddoes, Jesiek, and Borrego 2011). A variety of data collection
methods were used to evaluate these activities, from unstructured ‘feedback’ (e.g. Baiduc,
Linsenmeier, and Ruggeri 2016) to more structured approaches, such as ‘The Teacher
Beliefs Inventory’, a semi-structured interview protocol developed ‘to examine how
instructors’ … beliefs about teaching and learning shift during professional development
experiences’(Mattheis and Jensen 2014, 325). Ethnographic and case study approaches (e.g.
Sunal et al. 2001) were less frequently found in the literature. Analysis of the data enabled
researchers to construct models of professional development (e.g. Brancaccio-taras, Gull,
and Ratti 2016) and identify barriers to professional development (e.g. Felder, Brent, and
Prince 2011). Most of the evaluation studies were untheorised and assumed an unproblematic
relationship between the pedagogical training provided, which typically included topics such
as: ‘(1) design lesson plans; (2) use facilitating and lecturing skills in several teaching
opportunities; (3) self-reflect on [the] implementation of those activities; and (4) give and
receive peer feedback from the community of teachers in the course’ (Newton et al. 2010,

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10) and measurable ‘outcomes’ with regard to student achievements. Those who made use
of theoretical frameworks tended to draw on social constructivism (e.g. Hyde and Nanis
2006) or constructivist hybrids, such as ‘social cognitive theory and [graduate teaching
assistant] teaching literature, with support from the K–12 teaching self-efficacy literature’
(Dechenne and Enochs 2010, 2). One study took a social realist approach to evaluation,
conceptualising professional learning activities ‘as social systems in which there is a
constant interplay between individual agency and social structures’ producing a ‘mandala
of faculty development’ that modelled the complexity of ‘contexts, mechanisms, and
outcomes’ (Onyura et al. 2017, 171).

Findings: how STEM university teachers learn to teach

We studied the literature with a view to uncovering the implicit epistemic and social
relations in the pedagogical training of university teachers in STEM disciplines and
fields. The literature was then classified into three broad categories: 1) STEM pedagogical
training that addressed issues in disciplinary content as well as how key concepts or
processes could be taught (thus underpinned by both stronger epistemic and stronger
social relations), 2) studies that focused on pedagogical issues (thus revealing weaker
epistemic relations to STEM disciplinary knowledge, but stronger social relations to
pedagogy), and 3) studies that did not deal with the discipline or its pedagogy (thus
revealing both weaker epistemic and weaker social relations). There were no studies in
which we found stronger epistemic relations and weaker social relations (i.e. a study of
training on disciplinary content, without pedagogical training); this is probably because
STEM university teachers are generally not considered to be in need of STEM training
(Walsh 2017).

Reconnecting teaching to the disciplines

It might be expected that research studies on the training and supporting academic staff in
STEM pedagogy would have a STEM focus; that is, that the research literature would
reveal something about how STEM academics engage in professional learning towards
‘explaining concepts, theories and discipline knowledge in a way that students can easily
understand them … ensuring the delivery of accurate, up-to-date professional discipline
specific information’ (Corry and Timmins 2009, 390). However, only about a quarter of
the studies (20/77) in the data-base had a STEM focus – this is so uncommon in the
literature that Tenenberg and Fincher describe the ‘novelty’ of their approach as being
‘centered on the discipline, rather than treating teaching as a set of generic skills that, once
learned, can be applied in any discipline’ (2007, 514). One study explained the under-
representation of STEM in studies of STEM pedagogy by the likelihood that ‘instructional
development on most campuses is commonly provided by social scientists (generally
education and psychology faculty members) to campus-wide audiences’ (Felder, Brent, and
Prince 2011, 90).

The studies that specifically focussed on STEM tended to foreground curricular issues, such
as helping academics to develop a STEM curriculum and then teach it (Barth and
Rieckmann 2012; Frolik et al. 2013). This is not surprising as it would be difficult to avoid

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STEM content when curriculum development is the vehicle for professional learning. A
cluster of studies focussed on teaching specific STEM concepts and topics, such as ‘systems
thinking and wireless sensor networks, … electromagnetics, radio frequency (RF) circuit
design, communication systems, and embedded systems’ (Frolik et al. 2013, 2) and ‘process
control’ (Jwaid, Clark, and Ireson 2014). Some studies drew on versions of Shulman’s (1992)
Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) framework (Viiri 2003; Marquez, Sánchez, and
Valera 2013), and the subsequent Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK)
model (Jwaid, Clark, and Ireson 2014). Marquez, Sánchez, and Valera (2013) argue that
the PCK framework enabled STEM academics to ‘gradually develop their teaching
competencies by participating in real education innovation activities that are properly inter-
regulated by mentors who have experience in research into sciences and engineering
education’ (2013, 823). One initiative that explicitly linked disciplines and pedagogical
development was the ‘research knowledge utilization’ (RKU) framework (Porter et al. 2006)
which mapped the relationship between innovation in discipline-based research and its
possibilities for application to STEM teaching. The intention of the RKU model was to
enable staff to overcome the conflicting roles of researcher and teacher. The explicit linking
of discipline and pedagogy opened up a space for ‘methodological ecumenicalism’
(Tenenberg and McCartney 2010), particularly in computer education. The authors argue
that since ‘computing education is in its early development … we have far more to gain by
profligate method borrowing’ (2010, 4). By way of example, White and Irons (2009) drew
on social science methods to enable computer science educators to link research and
teaching in mapping an undergraduate curriculum in alignment with the Discovery-
Application-Teaching-Integration model (Boyer 1991).

The notion of drawing on methods and concepts from other disciplines to broaden and
enhance disciplinary perspectives in the academic development of STEM university teachers
is argued in several studies (e.g. Wistoft 2009; Olsson and Roxå 2012) thus discipline-based
academic development is ‘a cross-disciplinary subject that includes research about teaching,
learning, and knowledge formation’ (Olsson and Roxå 2012). In the context of
engineering, Felder and colleagues warn that ‘in the absence of discipline-specific
examples it is easy for engineers to dismiss programme content as irrelevant to their
courses, subjects, students, and problems’ (2011, 2). This need for a greater focus on the
discipline, does not imply that there is no role for academic developers, particularly those who
have applied linguistics, education, psychology or sociology as a home discipline. Indeed, the
literature suggests that social scientists can understand STEM disciplines and are thus able to
point out to STEM educators, for example, that a pedagogy that places ‘an over-emphasis on
facts or techniques misrepresents the true nature of real scientific practice’ (McWilliam,
Poronnik, and Taylor 2008, 229).

Reflective practice in learning to teach the STEM disciplines

This category represents the majority of studies (43/77) in the data-base, all of which
foreground pedagogy and background the STEM disciplines. The studies report on socially
inclusive pedagogies (Killpack and Melón 2016), partnerships with industry in support of
pedagogies of employability (Yuen et al. 2017), the role of mentoring relationships in STEM

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pedagogical training (Baiduc, Linsenmeier, and Ruggeri 2016), and collaborations and
networks in academic staff development (Slowinski, Walz, and Alfano 2016). Most of the
interventions reported on had the explicit intention to determine the extent to which
professional learning interventions had enabled STEM faculty to move away from
‘teacher-centred’ approaches (Lockwood, Miller, and Cromie 2014) toward the ‘exploration’
(Brancaccio-taras, Gull, and Ratti 2016) or ‘attainment’ of student-centred teaching
(Mattheis and Jensen 2014). A number of studies addressed pedagogical training that was
appropriate to particular institutional types, that is, particular pedagogies for research-
intensive (Newton et al. 2010) and teaching-intensive (Branoff, Lari, and Hsiang 2006)
institutions; but disciplinary differences were not made explicit. A very wide variety of
professional learning activities was noted: formal qualifications (Lockwood, Miller, and
Cromie 2014), short courses, workshops (Simon et al. 2011), mentoring (Baiduc, Linsenmeier,
and Ruggeri 2016) induction, collaboration (Slowinski, Walz, and Alfano 2016), seminars
and reading circles – as well as innovative activities, such as requiring new academic staff to
attend an undergraduate course in their first year of teaching so that they could ‘experience
the entire contents of the course in the same order that their students will’ (Suchan et al.
2006, 17); or inviting colleagues to peer-review each other’s teaching practice (Pembridge,
Allam, and Davids 2015). A common theme across most of the studies in this category
(and in university teacher development generally) was the important role of critical reflection
on practice in the attainment of pedagogical competence. A number of studies propose
teaching portfolios as a vehicle for reflecting on teaching (e.g. O’Mara et al. 2000). Sidhu
points out that ‘the primary aim of a [teaching portfolio] is to improve quality of teaching by
providing a structure for self-reflection, which in turn aids professional development’ (2015,
328).

University teachers are generally assumed to possess systematic knowledge related to their
disciplines or fields, but need to engage in professional learning to acquire a similar
systematic knowledge base with which to underpin their teaching practice and curricular
decision-making (Walsh 2017). About a third of the studies (20/68) entailed supporting
teaching assistants in acquiring pedagogical knowledge. This is not surprising as ‘Science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate teaching assistants play a
significant role in the learning environment of undergraduate students’ (Dechenne and
Enochs 2010, 1). Facilitating ‘graduate-student interaction with outstanding teaching-faculty
mentors’ is key to ‘producing the next generation of high-quality university teachers’
(Lockwood, Miller, and Cromie 2014, 17). Some of the studies have a focus on ‘new faculty
members [who] are often surprised by and uncomfortable with the number and breadth of
courses they are expected to teach’ (Newton et al. 2010, 15). Thus, the assumption that
STEM university teachers have mastered the particular STEM discipline that they are
teaching might need further investigation. With regard to the high numbers of teaching
assistants and new academics undertaking professional learning programmes it is a
concern that there was little in this cluster of studies that was STEM-specific (i.e.
pedagogies that addressed STEM concepts, processes and values).

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Broad, generic issues
The final cluster of studies (14/77) while seeming to address STEM pedagogy, on closer
inspection contained very little about either STEM or pedagogy. In most of these articles
STEM was the context or background of the study, rather than its specific focus. In reporting
on professional learning, this group tended to foreground educational technologies, such as
the potential of blogs for electronic teaching portfolios (Goh 2016) or the ‘My Reflection’
mobile app that reminds one to critically reflect on practice (Ibrahim et al. 2016). Some
articles discussed decontextualised presentation skills (Wyse, Long, and Ebert-May 2014),
while others lost their focus on STEM pedagogy in wider professional development issues,
such as the ‘triple nexus’ of teaching, research and scholarly engagement (Stevenson and
McArthur 2015), or foregrounded the importance of motivators, institutional incentives
and stakeholder cooperation (Janz, Wilkinson, and Kinley 2008) rather than STEM
pedagogy. Despite the STEM context, this cluster of studies was extremely generic.
Although some of the interventions were innovative, or were built around an important or
interesting idea, this had not been fully developed and their potential or actual
contribution to STEM pedagogy had not been addressed.

Table 3 summarises how the research on the professional education of STEM university
teachers engaged with STEM knowledge and pedagogy. We have shown how the epistemic
relations to STEM knowledge and social relations to pedagogy varied across the research
studies. Some of these variants are discussed below.

There are many issues to address in STEM pedagogical training – as the variety of
studies indicates. Issues such as student motivation, the ability to make a clear
presentation, or give useful feedback to students – or even to create a space to discuss
issues beyond student learning and pedagogy are often important and context-
depended. But while all the studies reviewed have some value, the focus that this paper
has taken on supporting students’ epistemological access to STEM disciplinary
knowledge is more likely to occur when there is evident STEM content in university
teacher training.

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Conclusion: the missing STEM
The key finding of this critical review of the literature on learning to teach the STEM
disciplines in higher education is how little focus there was on the STEM disciplines
themselves; the majority of studies reviewed did not address the key issue of what
makes the STEM disciplines difficult to learn and challenging to teach. We did not,
for example, find studies that drew on STEM ‘threshold concepts’ (Meyer and Land
2005) in academic staff development, although this approach is more common in
research studies on STEM student learning (e.g. Male and Bennett 2015). Instead,
interventions to improve teaching in the STEM disciplines tended to focus on the
practical issues of lesson planning, facilitation, presentation skills, and reflective
practice. While these generic aspects of teaching in higher education are important,
they are only a part of STEM pedagogical competence. What was missing in the
studies was the kinds of professional learning that would enable STEM university
teachers to provide ‘epistemological access’ (Morrow 2009) to STEM knowledge: to its
logic, systems, processes and values. This provision should be at the heart of STEM
academic development, yet the literature shows how little we know about teaching
STEM concepts. The professional development of STEM university teachers has
over-emphasised generic forms of teaching practice and neglected discipline-specific
teaching practice. This is, in a sense, understandable because STEM university
teachers are presumed to have expertise in STEM, but this assumption should be
challenged. For many STEM academics their areas of specialism are removed from the
undergraduate curriculum and its more basic concepts; in the case of teaching
assistants, new academics, or lecturers required to teach outside of their specialisms,
the particular undergraduate subject might not be all that familiar. Thus many
university teachers may need to re-visit key concepts in the STEM curriculum for
undergraduate teaching. Although teaching STEM is different from STEM-based
professional practice or research, the normative structure of STEM pedagogy derives
from STEM disciplines and fields, and not from a generic pedagogy. The focus on generic
pedagogy, rather than STEM pedagogy, can thus only partly address STEM pedagogical
competence. Muller points out that the assumption in higher education teaching that
‘the issue is pedagogical rather than epistemic [and] that the problem lies with the
practices of teaching and learning rather than with the logic of the knowledge’ is to
deny the importance of ‘epistemological access’ to disciplinary knowledge (2014, 260).

Directions for further research

This study did not intend to imply that there is no STEM pedagogical training at
universities; it is highly likely that there is commendable STEM pedagogical training in
many universities – but these interventions have not found their way into the published
literature. This is where more research is needed. It is proposed that a follow-up study is
conducted using an ‘evidence-informed’ systematic review of non-research evidence
(Chambers and Wilson 2012) on the pedagogical training of STEM academics. The
‘evidence-informed’ review, developed by McMaster University, includes criteria for
the appraisal of the relevance and trustworthiness of non-research evidence (Yost et

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al. 2014). Such a review would include sources of evidence such as course outlines,
training manuals and materials (e.g. Fry, Ketteridge, and Marshall 2009) that are
available from both faculty-based and institution-based teaching and learning centres,
as well as other training providers, such as the UK-based Higher Education Academy,
newspaper articles (e.g. De Kadt and Leibowitz 2016) and government reports (e.g.
European Higher Education Area 2003). Such an evidence-informed systematic review
is likely to provide a wider, richer and more contextualised understanding of the
actual practices being implemented.

Implications for STEM pedagogical training

The small group of studies identified that address STEM disciplinary content and
appropriate pedagogies offer some insights into what STEM pedagogical competence
might comprise and how university teachers might be supported in achieving such
competence. Pedagogical training that focuses both on key disciplinary concepts and on
how to teach these (e.g. Barth and Rieckmann 2012; Frolik et al. 2013), or that draws on
the pedagogical training afforded by PCK approaches (or variants of these) (e.g.
Marquez, Sánchez, and Valera 2013; Jwaid, Clark, and Ireson 2014) enable STEM
academics to develop interdisciplinary understandings of STEM pedagogy. There is, for
example, a growing literature on STEM ‘threshold concepts’ (Male and Bennett 2015)
and on ‘concept mapping’ (Kinchin 2014) in STEM disciplines and these approaches
could be productive for academic staff development. Training of academics in
problem-based learning and the ways in which these approaches might impact students’
understanding of STEM disciplinary concepts (e.g. Savin-Baden 2000) could be included
in professional development workshops or courses. There are emerging academic
development studies in lengthening (Shay, Wolff, and Clarence-Fincham 2016), as well
as pressure for fast-tracking (Hertzog and Chung 2015) time-to-qualification in STEM
programmes, and these create opportunities

Acknowledgement
Funding was provided for the ‘STEM pedagogy’ project by the South African National
Research Foundation and the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research
and Higher Education under a Sweden/South Africa Research Cooperation Grant, number
STINT160829186851.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by National Research Foundation: [grant number
STINT160829186851.].

ORCID
Christine Winberg http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6234-7358

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