Trainee Teachers' Attitudes and Readiness Towards Implementing STEM Education

The Ministry of Education Malaysia reported that the percentage of students who graduated from the science stream, including technical and vocational programmes, is declining. This situation raises concern about the education system's capability to produce adequate STEM graduates for economic sustainability. One of the initiatives is to equip trainee teachers with STEM education to attract students' interest in learning science. This explanatory sequential mixed-methods study investigates trainee teachers' attitudes towards STEM education values and feasibility. This study also identifies their readiness in subject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge to integrate STEM. A total of 64 trainee teachers from four different science education programmes participated in the study. The results indicated that trainee teachers showed a positive attitude towards integrated STEM education in terms of its values. However, they showed a negative attitude towards integrated STEM education in terms of its feasibility. Fortunately, their attitude towards their personal desire to become integrated STEM teachers was positive. The results also showed that trainee teachers had moderately low levels of pedagogical content knowledge and moderately high levels of subject content knowledge in STEM-related subjects. Based on the findings, there is a need to identify the obstacles to strengthening the trainee teachers' curriculum through new teaching and learning approaches and skills and abilities to improve student and public awareness of STEM education.