INVESTIGATING THE CHALLENGES TO SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION OF STEM INTEGRATION EDUCATION IN GHANA

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to look at the major challenges that need to be addressed as Ghana toes the path of STEM integration education. The study used concurrent mixed method as the study design and purposive and snowball sampling to sample thirteen (13) stakeholders. The stakeholders were teachers, parents, administrators for private STEM organizations including government officials in charge of STEM education in Ghana and a representative from Ashesi Design Lab. The instruments used for the data collection were questionnaire items for the quantitative part and a semi-structured interview for the qualitative part. All thirteen respondents answered the questionnaire whereas 12 respondents availed themselves for the interview. The data gathered were analysed separately yet concurrently. The quantitative part was analysed using percentages with the aid SPSS 24.0 software and the qualitative data were analysed using coding and themes. The findings reveal that a lot of teachers lack deep knowledge about STEM contents and pedagogical knowledge about how to integrate them, etc. The study recommends that the government of Ghana, through GES, must ensure that there would be training and retraining of teachers to be abreast with the acronym STEM and STEM integration education