Preface -- About the Authors -- Chapter 1 STEM Education Matters -- Chapter 2 Creativity and Critical Thinking -- Chapter 3 Fostering Students’ Creativity and Critical Thinking in Science Education -- Chapter 4 Exploring STEM Learning in Primary Classrooms: In Support of Social Justice Agendas -- Chapter 5 There’s Something About James -- Chapter 6 STEM, Creativity and Critical Thinking: How do Teachers Address Multiple Learning Demands? -- Chapter 7 Stimulating Creativity and Critical Thinking in Integrated STEM Education: The Contribution of Out-Of-School Activities -- Chapter 8 Critical Thinking Across Disciplines in University General Education: Obesity as a Socioscientific Issue -- Chapter 9 When Failure Means Success: Accounts of the Role of Failure in the Development of New Knowledge in the STEM Disciplines -- Chapter 10 Humanistic Goals for Science Education: STEM as an Opportunity to Reconsider Goals for Education -- Chapter 11 Final commentary: “Education in the 21st Century: STEM, Creativity and Critical Thinking”.

This book explores a range of issues central to STEM and 21st Century education. It explores research into the relationships between creativity, critical thinking and STEM Education from both a theoretical and practical perspective. It examines matters associated with three main concerns: First is the ways some research and development that is labelled “STEM” appears to be essentially one of the specific individual components, S, T, E or M, with a new label rather than something going across and/or beyond these more traditional components. The second, at times intertwining, concern is the common ways in which school curriculum continues to hold separate disciplines as its core. The third concern is that while cross-curriculum goals are increasingly common in this century - particularly for “creativity” and “critical thinking” - it is also common that the goals remain only vaguely linked with the more usual components of the whole curriculum. This book reflects on all three of these important concerns and the integrated whole that can result from them. Monash University, King’s College London and Waikato University have now generated six edited books on successive related research issues of significance to contemporary science education. Each of these books has been substantially shaped by a writing workshop involving all authors in intensive discussion about drafts of their contributions (a process of great worth in its own right, as well as for enhancing the value of the final volume), and then each author reworking the contribution in the light of the discussions The seventh will extend beyond science education and explore a range of issues central to STEM and 21st Century education.