Review of a Journal Article
Livstrom, I. C., Szostkowski, A. H., & Roehrig, G. H. (2019). Integrated STEM in practice: Learning from Montessori philosophies and practices. School Science and Mathematics, 119(4), 190-202.
In their 2019 article Integrated STEM in practice: Learning from Montessori philosophies and practices, Livstrom et al. sought to examine the theoretical and empirical characteristics of Montessori middle school science in the United States, and its alignment with the conceptual framework of integrated STEM. Firstly, this study explored the theoretical alignment between Montessori adolescent science curricula and pedagogy and the conceptual framework of integrated STEM and the conceptions of reform-based science (RBS). Then they conducted a national survey of 96 U.S. Montessori middle school science programs for adolescent to examine whether this theoretical connection exists in practice and the result revealed the current status of Montessori middle schools and found that integrated STEM happens organically in many Montessori middle schools through authentic and meaningful contexts and communities of practice, and suggest later scholars to consider alternative formal education settings outside traditional school spaces, such as Montessori classrooms.
First predicting by theoretical study, and then examining through empirical investigations, this article presents its findings in a well-organized, sectioned, and objectively way, adding a lot of value to their descriptive impact. However, due to the simplicity of the analysis employed, the vast possibilities to fully mine and utilize the data were abandoned by them. They could have further analyzed whether there are differences among the Montessori philosophies implementations in different types of schools. For example, whether the public and charter schools that have to adhere to mandated standards and assessment protocols do worse than private schools in creating authentic contextualized work, but do well in integrating content and discipline-specific standards and assessments? In this way, it will be more convincing when the advice to pay particular attention to public Montessori programs is prompted.
Furthermore, the methods used to gather the data and the characteristics of the sample schools were clearly explained in this article. However, this clarity is not reflected in the explanation of why Montessori Middle Schools was selected as the research object. As acknowledged by the authors, in the United States, the number of Montessori middle schools is far less than that of Montessori preschools and elementary programs. So why not conduct research at the elementary or pre-school stage, but choose the least number of secondary schools? In the entire article, they never mention the reason that they choose the adolescent stage to study. Whether this was an intentional omission or a sloppy oversight is unclear, but it weakened their clarity and accuracy.
Instead of striving to study the intentional implementation of STEM education as other scholars, the authors in this article focused their research efforts on examining the adolescent Montessori environments, where they believe integrated STEM already happens. This article successfully showed scholars and practitioners that the Montessori adolescent program is well situated to play an important role in the current landscape of science and STEM education policy and reform, and provided and a new perspective to think about the integrated STEM by open to spaces outside of mainstream education and scholarship. To some degree, this article responded to the paucity of the literature of Montessori science curricula and pedagogy for adolescents and made an interesting and significant contribution to the field of research.