Advancing STEM education research with ontology

Research in STEM education is rapidly growing. Many terms in use have no shared meanings, making knowledge dissemination and accumulation difficult, if not impossible. With new terms constantly added to the literature, and often inconsistently used, there is a need for a common framework of STEM education terms. There is also a need to “take stock” of what has been accomplished in the field. To that end, we propose the adoption of standards and techniques from the field of ontology engineering to construct a shared vocabulary system that defines a universe of terms and formal relations among them, to address this challenge. We created a reference ontology, STEM Identity Ontology (STEMIO), and a domain ontology, Science Teacher Identity Ontology (STIO), to demonstrate how ontologies can be leveraged to improve existing STEM identity data and future research in the area. Ontology engineering has been successfully deployed across research in medicine, engineering, social science, and education; it has potential to facilitate research in STEM education.