The focus of this article is to analyze the distribution patterns of student grades over time for different subjects and by gender. Specifically, we examined the final term grades of upper secondary students in Portuguese public schools across four subjects (Mathematics, Portuguese Language, Philosophy, and Physical Education) from the academic years 2013-2014 to 2017-2018. These grades reflect the teachers' perceptions of the students' knowledge gained throughout the academic year. We expected to see some regularity in the grade distributions over time for a particular subject. However, we found that the similarity of grades across subjects and time was so striking that differences were barely noticeable by visual inspection. Due to the very large sample sizes (in the order of tens of thousands), the quantification of similarities and dissimilarities was done through distribution’s proximity statistics and not by classic statistical methods, like Chi-Square or comparison of means tests. Additionally, we applied a methodology of multiple equivalence tests to globally compare the relative frequencies of each of the grades in pairs of independent samples. Our analysis showed that there was a high level of similarity in grades for the same subject over time, but we also found differences between subjects and between genders.

STEM education is an irreplaceable movement of educational systems across the globe in the 21st century. Both Pre-K, K-12, and higher education institutions consider STEM as an innovative approach to integrate and reform the teaching and learning processes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of studies on STEM in the Early Childhood Education context from 1992 to 2022. We investigated a dataset of 308 scholarly works from the Clarivate Web of Science database and figured a diversified collection of research focuses on topics such as children’s readiness, outcomes, teachers’ competency in designing and implementing STEM activities, and the role of computational thinking and robotics. The findings of this paper revealed the dominant contribution of researchers from the USA regarding research quantity and impact, as well as their collaborations with researchers from Western countries. In addition, we also figured out the top influencing authors, documents, and journals as a suggestion for scholars who are new to this topic. However, we would like to note that our findings depended on the quality of the imported database from the WoS system, which covers top-tier journals only.