Cultivating STEM talents is a serious and urgent issue of the times

In today's era, the fourth wave of the industrial revolution is sweeping the world, and society is increasingly calling for highly qualified talents with strong innovation, strong solution power, and strong adaptability. The condition of a country's talents largely affects its innovation capability and reflects the core soft power of its development. Cultivating STEM talents through STEM education plays an important role in enhancing national soft power. In the face of the current fierce international competition, vigorously cultivating STEM talents can advance China's initiative in international science and technology competition, enhance China's discourse and influence in the field of innovation, and also provide talent support to promote international exchange and cooperation in science and technology culture.

Education concept: Integrate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics knowledge to effectively solve complex problems

STEM is a combination of the initials of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics - Science requires following objective laws, focusing on the cognition of natural processes, and revealing the causality of things. STEM education emphasizes the deep integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to cultivate talents with innovative and creative abilities, and to enhance The enhancement of the core literacy of talents.

STEM talents can use the knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to solve complex problems holistically and effectively, which profoundly reflects the concept of STEM education and is a valuable pursuit of STEM education itself. STEM education has outstanding features such as interdisciplinary, integration, and creation, which can break through the boundaries of disciplines, majors, and environments, reflecting a new concept and new mode of talent cultivation, reflecting the essential requirements of the quality of highly skilled talents, and meeting the requirements of the times and the trend of future education development.

Vigorously cultivating STEM talents has become a common topic of concern and common practical action in various countries. In recent years, developed countries in the West have generally attached importance to STEM education and given special support to STEM education in terms of policies and financial resources, creating the necessary conditions for the emergence of scientific and technological innovation talents. China is also paying more and more attention to STEM education. As early as 2016, the 13th Five-Year Plan of Education Informatization issued by the Ministry of Education proposed to explore new education models such as STEM education. The "China STEM Education 2029 Innovation Action Plan" released by the Chinese Academy of Education Sciences proposes an unrestricted plan for STEM talent training. From 2000 to 2019, the number of STEM doctoral degrees awarded in more than ten universities in China increased from 9,038 to 49,498.

Facing challenges: Cultivating STEM talents is a serious and urgent issue of the times

Cultivating STEM talents is an objective need for China's domestic economic and social development.

On the one hand, cultivating STEM talents is an objective requirement to promote the optimization, transformation, and upgrading of China's industrial structure. The official website of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security shows that by the end of 2021, among the 74.652 million employed people in China, there are about 60 million highly skilled talents. Therefore, there is a need to take cultivating STEM talents as an opportunity to foster innovative talents and promote labor division and skills transformation through specialized STEM skills training. On the other hand, cultivating STEM talents lays the foundation for the construction of a strong science and technology nation in China. According to the data of People's Daily, China's national innovation capacity will be ranked 12th in the world in 2021. Cultivating STEM talents and creating a good atmosphere for science and technology innovation in the whole society can improve the scientific literacy and innovation ability of talents and promote the national innovation capability as a whole.

Cultivating STEM talents is an inevitable choice to cope with fierce international competition.

The 2021 Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI) report released by INSEAD shows that China is among the top 40 in terms of international talent competitiveness for the first time. Cultivating internationally competitive STEM talents can seize the opportunity in the world's emerging industrial fields. At the same time, a well-developed STEM talent program can more effectively increase the attractiveness of STEM talent to foreign countries.

Cultivating STEM talents is the fundamental guarantee of a sound talent team in China.

The structural contradiction of China's talent team is more prominent, mainly reflected in the lack of STEM talents engaged in basic and frontier discipline research and cutting-edge technology development. Therefore, STEM education is needed to fill the gap of STEM talents in China and create a new high ground for talent gathering. At the same time, we also need to see that STEM education in China started late, the support is not perfect, and the employment and development environment of STEM talents presents certain problems. It is necessary to create a good development environment for STEM talents by forming an integrated development strategy and diversified policy support.

Cultivating STEM talents meets the inherent requirements of their development.

STEM education aims to cultivate talents with the ability to apply what they have learned and solve problems creatively, to create STEM talents with scientific literacy and critical thinking, and to equip them with higher comprehensive quality. In addition, STEM education enables talents to be lifelong learners, adapt to the changing social environment, and cope with the changes brought by technology and society.

Implementation Initiatives: Multi-entity synergy, all-round coordination, and systematic follow-up of the whole process

Cultivating STEM talents embodies the characteristics of holistic and coordinated education and talent cultivation, which requires the concerted efforts of multiple subjects, all-around coordination, systematic follow-up of the whole process, and the exploration of practical strategies for talent cultivation at three levels: macro, meso, and micro.

From the macro level, to build a talent cultivation guarantee system adapted to China's development, STEM talent cultivation focuses on policies, platforms, curriculum, teams, and other perspectives, and needs to integrate the strength of multiple parties to jointly promote STEM talent cultivation. It is necessary to play the guiding role and policy-oriented role of the government in education and talent strategy, strengthen the institutional guarantee of STEM talent cultivation, and clarify the development direction of STEM talent cultivation. Provide policy support for funding, faculty, platform construction, curriculum resources, etc. involved in STEM talent cultivation. Promote the hierarchical and diversified cultivation of STEM talents, emphasize the cultivation of "top" talents as well as the role of "basic" talents in the cultivation of talents, and promote the development of STEM talents at all levels in cooperation and integration with each other. We will innovate the mechanism of STEM talent cultivation and strengthen cooperation with enterprises and science and technology venues to promote the cultivation of STEM talents' practical ability.

At the meso level, train and create professional STEM teachers. Professional teachers are an important guarantee for STEM talent cultivation. STEM talent cultivation requires teachers to have the comprehensive quality of interdisciplinary, interprofessional, and interdisciplinary fields, and needs to focus on professional education for teachers. STEM education majors should be developed as an emerging discipline, and STEM education majors should be opened in higher education to increase the number of future full-time teacher practitioners. For the group of teachers in basic subjects, plans should be made for STEM teacher training and rotation, and teachers' teaching levels and professionalism should be improved through special lectures and curriculum training. In addition, certain policies should be adopted to bring in advanced STEM education talents from abroad to strengthen our teaching force.

At the micro level, the efforts of STEM education curriculum reform should be increased. the core concept of STEM education is to emphasize interdisciplinary integration. Therefore, a brand new disciplinary curriculum can be set up, planned, and designed in terms of teaching objectives, teaching materials, methods, and environment. In the curriculum reform, the associated courses are integrated to form a strategy of disciplinary curriculum integration. For example, technology, learning problems, and project transformation are embedded in the traditional curriculum to enhance students' practical skills and to develop students' problem-solving thinking in project design. We make full use of existing social resources, socialize curriculum resources and curricular social resources, focus on the presentation of cutting-edge technologies in the curriculum, and build a link between society and the curriculum to continuously enhance the attractiveness and centripetal force of STEM education.