Investigating STEM Courses Performance in Brazilians Higher Education.

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) has become a popular term in Education worldwide and has received increasing attention in recent years in Brazil. However, developing a reliable assessment of interdisciplinary learning in STEM courses has been challenging. This chapter performed an extended investigation on all the Brazilian STEM courses using the National Assessment of Student Achievement (ENADE) datasets and improved our previous innovative methodology. ENADE datasets are maintained by National Institute for Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira and correspond to data about all final year STEM students who performed the exams in 2005, 2008, 2011, 2014, and 2017. Our dataset contains 527,058 events; it was used to compare groups of female and male students’ academic performances, the grades obtained through the years, the mean ages, and compare the performance between the types of Brazilian universities.