Factors Influencing K-12 STEM Teachers' Interdisciplinary Teaching Competency

Interdisciplinary teaching is the essential characteristic of STEM education. STEM teachers need superior interdisciplinary teaching competency to gain professional success and development. Through grounded theory, this study tries to reveal the influencing factors and improvement strategies for interdisciplinary teaching. Through open coding, spindle coding, and selective coding, the factors system and its working mechanism were discovered. The personal-psychological factors group, functioning as innovation consciousness and cognition of occupational value, is the endogenous power source for interdisciplinary teaching. The instructional-procedural factors group, including multidisciplinary knowledge, STEM pedagogy, and team cooperation ability, is the methodological basis of integrative and problem-based teaching in STEM. The organizational-environmental factors group, covering organizational environment and culture and social support, is the policy and culture basis of STEM interdisciplinary teaching and also has a mutual effect on personal-psychological factors and instructional-procedural factors. Based on the working mechanism, the strategies are finally proposed from four key points of further work. There is the development plan, the community building, the incentive policy, and the evaluation system that aim to improve the interdisciplinary teaching competency of STEM teachers.