Publications

Solving many of the pressing issues facing the world today will require a deep and integrated understanding of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). To prepare today’s K-12 students to tackle these challenges, STEM education must create opportunities to learn disciplinary content while inventing actionable solutions to messy, interdisciplinary problems. Learning frameworks, such as Project-Based Learning (PBL), Design-Based Learning (DBL), and Entrepreneurial-Based Learning (EBL), could support this reconceptualization of STEM education. New approaches are needed that leverage and integrate what works from these frameworks to better prepare students for success post-schooling. This means leveraging frameworks that emphasize practices and ways of thinking that support students to build and justify solutions that create value for users, while also creating a need for disciplinary content knowledge. This is especially necessary for mathematics, a discipline that is often treated insufficiently in interdisciplinary STEM activities. This paper introduces the Design & Pitch (D&P) Challenges in STEM Learning Framework, a novel learning framework that leverages features of PBL, DBL, and EBL, situating math learning within entrepreneurial pitch competitions. It describes the D&P Learning Framework and explores how each contributing learning framework combines to enhance students’ work, focusing their mathematical reasoning, while also empowering them to invent relevant solutions to authentic problems.

Suggested citation: 

Belcher, M., Confrey, J., Krupa, E. E., & Borden, M. L. (2025). The Design & Pitch Challenges in STEM: A Theoretical Framework for Centering Mathematics Learning in Entrepreneurial Pitch Competitions. Education Sciences, 15(6), 651. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15060651