The Role of STEM Education in Improving the Quality of Education: A Bibliometric Study

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) has launched several initiatives to promote the role of education in sustainable development goals (SDGs) and set Goal 4 for quality education among the 17 SDGs. An integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) approach is a promising framework for sustainable development education and improving the quality of education. In this study, a bibliometric analysis was applied to evaluate the scientific results of the role of integrated STEM education to improve the education quality (SDG 4). A total of 160 publications out of 74,879 "education quality" and 5,430 "STEM education" documents were taken from the SCOPUS database for the period of 28 years 1993-2021. The Number of publications per year, Average citations per year, "Keywords Index" and "Author's Keywords" co-occurrence network, and high ranked papers were analysed by VoSviewer and Bibliometrix-package. The findings show the importance of "early childhood education", "education computing", and "environmental education" roles in the quality of education. The results can be applied to enhance the understanding of integrated STEM education in improving the quality of education and support future work in this area.