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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 21, Issue 1, Article 6 (Dec., 2021) |
Educating according to skills of 21st century directed educators to create STEM education which is an interdisciplinary approach. Interdisciplinary characteristic of STEM education creates a harmony of four disciplines and their subcategories, which overlaps every aspect of a real-life problem (Moskal et.al., 2007). Although there is an emerging need, students’ interest of pursuing STEM related careers has been shown gradually decreasing profile all around the world (Cavaş, 2012; Cavaş, Bulut, Holbrook & Rannikmae, 2013; Nite, Capraro, Capraro & Biçer, 2017; Özel, 2013; Sanders, 2009; Schachter, 2011). By considering this situation, STEM education has been promoted by governments and educational initiatives. Stakeholders of STEM education such as teachers or policy makers have different understandings of STEM education (Brown, Brown, Reardon & Merrill, 2011). As Breiner et.al. (2012) explained, some of them accept it as integration of four disciplines to solve real life problems and the other ones accepted it as traditional coursework which lacks integration. However, all stakeholders have agreed on STEM being one of the top educational priorities (e.g., Scott, 2012). As Breiner et al. (2012) explained, policy makers and educators become aware of STEM being important focus of education reform and global competitiveness, which evolved from governmental policy with the guidance from National Science Foundation (NSF). In order to educate students for 21st century and rising jobs, governments reserve big budgets for STEM education, especially for Race to the Top competition (Breiner et al., 2012; Johnson, 2012).
Despite STEM education being more demanding need for developed countries, the U.S. and European Union countries lead the way to promote STEM education. They aim to maintain sustainable economic growth. Before OECD report, as Dugger (2010) mentioned, STEM education was already supported in U.S. by many projects such as Technology for All Americans Project (1994-2005) and Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology (2000-2007) which are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Nite et al., 2017). In 2005 the report called Tapping America’s Potential: Education for Innovation released by a group of technology and business initiatives (Tsupros, Kohler & Hallinen, 2009), which shed lights on the actions to support STEM education such as building national support, increase motivation to enter STEM careers and so on. Similar STEM education promotions projects which are funded by European Commission (EC) have been done in Europe as well. EC has aimed to increase interest in STEM education with many projects such as Promise, Roberta-EU, Update, Profiles, Pathway, Fibonacci, Parsel, S-TEAM, Engineer in between 2002-2006; Horizon 2020 in between 2014-2020 (EC., 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). Through these projects, STEM education has been carried out to all Europe coordinately. Likewise in our country, with the support of projects which are funded by EC, the Scientific and Technological Research Council (TUBITAK), or by other collaborations, STEM education activities have accelerated within the last two decades so that show big leap in the STEM areas (Akaygün et. al., 2015a; Akaygün et. al., 2015b; BAU, 2015; Han et al., 2015; Stohlman, Moore & Roehrig, 2012). Furthermore, in our country, educating students to be STEM literate is the main concerns of the national curricula because there is a need to provide STEM education opportunities to disadvantaged students through formal education programs.
Despite such efforts, education authorities have little awareness about how STEM education is implemented in school, actually. The main reason behind it is the fact that there is lack of information about how teachers, as a key stakeholder, value and implement STEM education in schools. Despite the governments’ focused interest in STEM education, roles, responsibilities and required teacher trainings has not been well established yet (Shin & Han, 2011; Silverstein, Dubner, Miller, Glied & Loike, 2009; Chen, Huang, & Wu, 2021). As Bybee (2013) stated, it is important that stakeholders of STEM education have their own understanding of STEM education for better manage it local level. However, this situation causes difficulties for teachers because STEM education understanding of teacher might differ on personal and practical level.
Besides skills that cut across the four disciplines, STEM education requires skills and abilities which are different from traditional practices such as sharing responsibilities with students in classroom management and collaborating with other teachers from different fields (Herschbach, 2011; Ragusa, 2012; Ward & Lee, 2002; Wang, Moore, Roehrig & Park, 2011). However, many teachers feel insufficient to teach STEM. As Ward & Lee (2002) said, although some of the teachers know theoretical part of requirements of STEM education, their practical experience is not enough; that’s why, some precautions need to be taken to support teachers. New or adapted teaching strategies that simulate real-world situations may be required to gain new experience in teaching integrated STEM programs. Effective professional development enables teachers to gain necessary pedagogical skills to teach STEM, which will eventually affect STEM learning experiences of students (Capraro et al., 2016). There have been many STEM related studies (Capraro et al., 2016; Darling-Hammond, 2000; Darling-Hammond & Youngs, 2002; Guskey, 2003; Richards, Gallo & Renandya, 2001; Wayne, & Youngs, 2003) which looks relations between STEM teaching skills and experiences of teachers and students’ STEM learning performance. Results of the studies revealed that inefficient taught STEM education have negative effect on students’ performance because students learned more from qualified educators who have sufficient pedagogical knowledge. Thus, effective personal development has extreme importance for teachers in order them to adapt their teaching skills to STEM education which is in the focus of 21st century’s educational reforms. Online environment (Denton, Davis, Smith, Beason, & Strader, 2005), heterogeneous groups (Çorlu, 2012; 2013), self-evaluation bases (Dugger, 2010; Whitaker, Kinzie, Kraft-Sayer, Mashburn, & Pianta, 2007), and collaborative professional learning communities (Ernest, 1989; van Es, 2011) revealed as ways of providing effective sustainable professional development for teachers.
Based on the gap in the literature which is lack of research which try to reveal teachers’ attitudes, readiness and views to adapt their teaching skills to STEM education, the aim of the present study is to reveal science teachers’ attitudes, readiness and views for STEM education. The main goal was to investigate minds of science teachers by deeply analyzing what they are implementing or planning to do in their lessons. Also, with current study, it was aimed to investigate the factors which help and hinder STEM implementation ability of science teachers. The following the research questions have arisen:
- What are the attitudes of science teachers towards STEM education?
- What is the readiness of science teachers towards STEM education?
- Do these attitudes and readiness effect implementation of STEM education?
- What are the science teachers’ views about STEM education?
