ABSTRACT
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education plays an important role in preparing qualified world citizenship in the 21st century. Recently, STEM education has been promoted in the National Education Plan (2017–2036) as a key approach for producing innovative thinkers. With this way of learning, we hope the country will ultimately be released from the middle-income trap. To achieve the goal, science teacher education has a new challenge to prepare STEM teachers and encourage them to transform their STEM knowledge and practices to students in a particular context. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the roles of STEM education in Thailand. We describe Thai in-service and pre-service teachers’ understanding of, perceptions about, and attitudes towards STEM education and highlight the challenges of implementing STEM in the classrooms. We then discuss the key features of a STEM teacher education programme designed for the Thai context using a framework of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The PCK-based STEM teacher education programme provides in-service and pre-service teachers opportunities to develop their STEM teaching competencies. Through the programme, we discuss the way in which the teachers learn to teach STEM in particular topics, how to link STEM activities to curriculum and standards, and approaches for assessing student learning through STEM instruction. We conclude the chapter by providing recommendations related to STEM teacher education for teacher educators and researchers.
