The role of STEM Education in improving the quality of education: a bibliometric study

The United Nations (UN) has launched several initiatives to promote the role of education in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and set Goal 4 for quality education among other SDGs. The integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) approach is a promising educational framework for sustainable development that improves education quality. In this study, a bibliometric analysis was conducted to evaluate the scientific results of the role of integrated STEM education specifically in improving the quality of education (SDG 4). A hundred and fifty publications, with an increasing trend in the number of documents each year, out of the total number of 74,879 documents related to “education quality” and 5,430 documents related to “STEM education” were chosen from the SCOPUS database. The study analyzes the growth and development of research activities in the area of “STEM education” and “Quality education” as reflected in the publications output in the time span of 27 years from 1993 to 2020. The publication and citation trends, the most frequently used keywords, the most influential authors and journals, and the research hotspots were investigated using VoSviewer and Bibliometrix software. Accordingly, the United States happened to be the most productive country in this field owning two-thirds of the number of publications. The “Science Education” journal is ranked at the top of the highly cited journals. The findings show that topics such as “early childhood education”, “computing education”, and “environmental education” are the main hotspots in the research area of STEM and quality of education. The results of this study will help enhance the understanding of integrated STEM education in improving the quality of education and will support future works in this area.