Recently, STEM education has emphasized in many countries including Vietnam
because of its’ benefits. To prepare for effective STEM education instruction, the role of
education universities in training pre-service teachers is concerned. To support training of STEM
teaching instruction in classrooms for pre-service teachers, it is necessary to know their
conceptualization of STEM conception and differences of their views with in-service teachers’
conceptions so that pre-service teachers work more effectively in their internship and near future
in schools. However, little has been reported on how pre-service teachers are conceptualizing
STEM education, and differences between pre-service teachers and in-service teachers’ STEM
education conception who have more experiences in real classrooms in Mekong, Delta, Vietnam.
In this study, to explore their STEM conception, an open-ended survey collecting both textual
and visual responses was given to 100 in-service teachers from 10 schools in Can Tho city and
185 pre-service teachers of the Physics teacher education program, Can Tho University,
Vietnam. The findings showed that both in-service teachers and pre-service teachers keep
various ideas about STEM conception. They have both similarities and differences in
conceptualization.