STEM Education

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), previously Science, Math, Engineering and Technology (SMET), is a term used to group together these academic disciplines. This term is typically used when addressing education policy and curriculum choices in schools to improve competitiveness in science and technology development. It has implications for workforce development, national security concerns and immigration policy. The science in STEM typically refers to two out of the three major branches of science: natural sciences, including biology, physics, and chemistry, and formal sciences, of which mathematics is an example, along with logic and statistics; the third major branch of science, social sciences, including psychology, sociology, and political science, are categorized separately from the other two branches of science, and are instead grouped together with humanities and arts to form another counterpart acronym named HASS - Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.