Within the ‘Principals as STEM Leaders – Building the Evidence Base for Improved STEM Learning’ project, funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment, and led by the University of Tasmania, we investigated the perceptions of a sample of 21 principals about the teaching and learning of STEM.
The data were collected by using the Draw a STEM Learning Environment (D-STEM) instrument – a multimodal research instrument combining drawing and text (Hatisaru et al., 2020, pp. 23–4). The first page of D-STEM provides a rectangular area in which participants are asked to draw: Think about the teachers of STEM and kinds of things they do. Draw a STEM learning environment. The second page provides an open-ended item which asks participants to explain their drawings (figures 1 and 2 capture example responses).
