STEM Forward
Why STEM?
America’s national innovation base depends more than ever on a strong, cross-sector collaboration around common STEM education interests and goals—a STEM ecosystem—that can provide all Americans with access to high-quality STEM education throughout their lifetimes. Establishing a path to basic STEM literacy for everyone is vital to preparing a diverse workforce needed for the United States to lead and prosper in an increasingly competitive world driven by advanced technology.
STEM education has been evolving from a convenient clustering of four overlapping disciplines toward a more cohesive knowledge base and skill set critical for the economy of the 21st century. The best STEM education provides an interdisciplinary approach to learning, where rigorous academic concepts are coupled with real-world applications and students use STEM in contexts that make connections between school, community, work, and the wider world. Leaders in STEM education continue to broaden and deepen its scope and further transcend the fields of study beyond just a combination of the four disciplines to include the arts and humanities. Modern STEM education imparts not only skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, higher order thinking, design, and inference, but also behavioral competencies such as perseverance, adaptability, cooperation, organization, and responsibility.