Enhancing Entrepreneurial Mindsets Through STEM Education

Entrepreneurship is defined in different fields with definitions ranging from a specific perspective such as starting a business to a broader perspective such as a process of establishing new social, economic, environmental, institutional, cultural and/or scientific environments. There has been some movement toward entrepreneurship in STEM education through hackathons and makerspaces, but they tend to be limited to informal settings. In higher education, there seems to be a border line between business schools and education departments. This book aims to remove the borders between the Business Schools and the Department of Education and help Business Schools to develop their educational practices further and help Education Departments to develop their knowledge of entrepreneurship from its formal discipline. The purpose of this book is to bring together experts from STEM education and the formal discipline of entrepreneurship to explore the role of STEM in everyday life through an entrepreneurial lens and show how this integration can broaden STEM education practices.

Auteur

Dr. Sila Kaya-Capocci is an Assistant Professor of Science Education at Agri Ibrahim Cecen University in Agri, Turkey. She holds international degrees in science education (undergraduate education in Turkey; M.Sc. in the UK; Ph.D. at UL, Ireland; postdoc at DCU, Ireland) and has international teaching experience at primary, post-primary, and university levels. Dr. Kaya-Capocci's expertise involves the areas of formative assessment, entrepreneurship, and STEM education, where she has international publications. Dr. Kaya-Capocci is mainly interested in understanding how entrepreneurship and STEM education work together and developing students' entrepreneurial STEM understanding and skills in STEM contexts. She has been involved in and coordinated national and international projects. She managed an EU funded project, entitled Assessment of Transversal Skills in STEM (ATS-STEM), aimed to enhance digital assessment of second-level students' transversal skills in STEM by developing a framework and teaching, learning, and assessment materials for this aim. Another project she managed was entitled Women as Catalyst for Change in STEM Education (STEMChAT, SFI funded project) aimed to encourage female post-primary students to pursue STEM subjects and careers. The project brought post-primary students together with the company managers, academics, and STEM undergraduates. She has also worked as an Editor of an education supplement for students as part of a national newspaper series in Ireland. This teaching and learning resource was a secondary-level science supplement that aimed to assist teachers in formulating assessment, aid with familiarisation of the new Irish syllabus, and promote critical and creative thinking. Dr. Kaya-Capocci holds editorial and reviewer positions at different national and international journals. Dr. Erin Peters-Burton is the Donna R. and David E. Sterling Endowed Professor in Science Education and Director of the Center for Social Equity through Science Education at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA. Dr. Peters-Burton's research agenda is based in social justice and she pursues projects that help students who feel excluded in science classes become more aware of the scientific enterprise and how scientific knowledge is generated. She is interested in the nexus of the nature of science, science teacher pedagogical content knowledge, computational thinking, and educational psychology. She is PI for an NSF-funded research project entitled, Fostering Student Computational Thinking with Self-Regulated Learning, which has developed an electronic notebook that prompts students to think computationally with self-regulated learning strategies while collecting analytics on student learning (SPIN; Science Practices Innovation Notebook). She has been co-PI for two NSF-funded grants, Opportunity Structures for Preparation and Inspiration in STEM (OSPrI) and Developing aModel of STEM-Focused Elementary Schools (eSTEM) that have empirically identified criteria for the design of successful inclusive STEM high schools and elementary schools. In addition, Dr. Peters-Burton is an editor of the STEM Road Map curriculum series published by NSTA Press, which is a K-12 curriculum based on 5-week problem-based learning modules that integrate STEM, English language arts, and social studies concepts and practices. Dr. Peters-Burton is an Associate Editor of the journal School Science and Mathematics.