STEM Literacy of Students in Vocational Education

Abstract

Knowledge of all disciplines is more or less equally important and crucial but, in education management, it is important to integrate disciplines so that the knowledge is useful and can be applied to create new things, solve problems and prevent future threats. STEM education for vocational student is not only a trend in education, but also an instructional approach that focuses on students and will lead to sustainable knowledge and learning. This research studied documents that explored the importance of STEM literacy for vocational school students in Thailand. Vocational education must be aligned with Thailand 4.0 and Industrial 4.0 models, and thus vocational schools must adjust their learning approach to be aligned with the Education 4.0 model. As vocational school students will be valuable to the development of the country, STEM literacy must be integrated into a project-based learning model which is a teaching approach for creating invention and innovation. The result of the study shows that STEM literacy for Thai vocational education consists of six components: identifying a STEM problem, exploring and acquiring new knowledge, applying STEM concepts, solving the STEM problem, communicating STEM information and making a STEM decision. The aforementioned components can be used to create a STEM literacy evaluation form for vocational school students.