Will her efforts turn out the next Bill Gates? That she doesn’t know. But Nelson does want her students to be better prepared to compete when they enter the workforce.
“Any kind of job is going to involve a lot more STEM,’’ she said.
Preschools have long followed the practice of elementary education and dabbled with bits and pieces of science-based teaching in their everyday learning: Playing with blocks, for example, learning numbers, and coloring are all aspects of engineering, math, and science.
But what is happening now is that such lessons are becoming formalized within a preschool curriculum. And within the early childhood development community there is a greater emphasis on training teachers to turn simple play into lessons that encourage critical thinking.
The push to focus on science, technology, engineering, and math in preschools follows decades of advocacy by education experts, policy makers, and politicians who have long complained about the poor state of science and math education in American classrooms.
Many corporations promote the STEM subjects as a way to boost the number of scientists, computer programmers, engineers, and mathematicians coming out of American universities.
The percent of college graduates with science and engineering degrees has declined modestly over the past 45 years, but more importantly, the United States is lagging far behind globally. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks the nation 24th among 31 of its member countries in terms of employed 25- to 34-year-olds with degrees in science, math, or related fields.
The Obama administration is attempting to change that.
In the president’s budget plan, presented to Congress Feb. 13, he asked for $80 million to train 100,000 math and science teachers in hopes the effort will result in 1 million more college graduates with degrees in those subjects.
