Complexity, Intellectual Challenge and Ongoing Support: Key Learning Conditions to Enhance Students’ Engagement in STEM Education

There is a challenge in maintaining student enrolment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) beyond the compulsory years of school. Motivation to learn in these areas requires teachers to attend to personal values and dispositions of their students, provide opportunities to develop a sense of achievement and positive self-efficacy with positive role models for a diversity of learners. While these intrinsic factors are important to attend to, extrinsic factors such as the contextual reality for students (home and school), interactions between teachers, students, parents and other persons of influence and the nature of the learning experience are also important. Additionally, the quality of the learning experiences is strongly influenced by student intellectual, affective and behavioural engagement in an environment where social and cultural factors and the very nature of the learning environment itself is valued through providing consistency of the environmental complexity for all learners together with challenge and support within this environment. The development of the online environments in The National Virtual School of Emerging Sciences (NVSES) and the Graduate Certificate of STEM education provide an example of a complex learning environment where the engagement of students was a central consideration in their development and implementation. In considering the complexity of an online learning environment first in a unique secondary school context in NVSES and extended to what was learnt in the online tertiary learning environment, it can be seen how these factors identified above play out in promoting student engagement in STEM learning. It is hoped that such engagement will play a significant role in maintaining consistent students’ enrolments in STEM beyond compulsory years of schooling.