How Did the Egyptians Transport the Stone Blocks of the Pyramids?: Design of a STEM Practice to Address the Simple Machines in Initial Teacher Training

Introduction And Background

Research in Science Education widely highlighted those pre-service elementary teachers need to acquire a systemic perspective to improve science teaching in their future professional performance. This systemic perspective is needed to reflect how science is practiced in the real world and to link school science to significant problems of current society (Brewer & Smith, 2011; Labov et al., 2010; McCright et al., 2013; NGSS Lead States, 2013; Timmis et al., 2019). However, educational curricula place science (as the rest of other subjects) in separate compartments. As a results of this reductionist approach, integration of subjects is perceived as difficult and costly by most teachers (both in-service and pre-service) (Leszczynski, 2014). Considering this situation, it is necessary to train future teachers to integrate science with other related subjects (such as mathematics or technology). STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) approach could be a chance to strengthen these interactions in science lessons with pre-service teachers (Bybee, 2010). This is especially relevant for Spanish pre-service teachers, since Spanish educational system has recently included the STEM skill as a mandatory expertise in elementary education (Spanish Government, 2022). Thus, there are new contents in the Primary Education curriculum related with STEM approach that teachers are going to deal with from now on such as the relationship between advances in mathematics, science, engineering and technology for understand the evolution of society in the scientific-technological field, or Science, technology and engineering as human activities: the STEM professions today from a gender perspective. However, most practices labelled as STEM are of deficient educational quality and are scarcely new compared to existing science education approaches (Maass et al., 2019; McComas & Burgin, 2020; Toma & García-Carmona, 2021; White & Delaney, 2021). According to these authors, it is necessary to design and validate meaningful STEM education experiences, with real and proper integrations between the four disciplines of the STEM acronym. Additionally, it is necessary to implement them in initial training of elementary teachers, promoting these students to understand the integrated nature of STEM approach and the connections among the disciplines (Altan & Ercan, 2016; Pimthong & Williams, 2018).

Physics is a hard science to pre-service elementary teachers (Bravo et al., 2022; Brígido et al., 2010; Brígido et al., 2013; Hernández-Barco et al., 2021; Mellado et al., 2014), describing, in relation to its learning and its future teaching, negative emotions (such as nervousness, frustration, worry, uncertainty…) and low levels of self-efficacy. In addition, it is well-known that these students often hold several misconceptions related to Physics contents (Lawrenz, 1986). One of the areas related to misconceptions is simple machines and forces involved in its operation (Diani et al., 2020; Winarno et al., 2019). These are one of the science contents these university students will have to teach in their future professional performance (Spanish Government, 2014). Tacking this into account, it is necessary to improve the training of future teachers in relation to simple machines and its didactic.