Case Study of Teacher Training for Project STEM Course

Abstract

Educators are paying more attention to students' hands-on ability with critical thinking which has not been emphasized in previous Chinese education system. To fill this gap, there is a need to organize a hands-on workshop to develop teachers’ STEM hands-on skills to promote on high school campus. Therefore, the purposes of this study are: 1. exploring the development status of teachers' hands-on ability after ending the workshop and 2. exploring the effectiveness of the project-based STEM training with interdisciplinary concept content compared with the traditional STEM training. Based on the two-day teacher training of STEM workshop, this paper used Flanders interaction analysis which is an observation technique used to record and analyze the process and impact of teacher-student interaction in the classroom. Through the analysis, we found that the learners were active in this training course, the interaction between teachers and learners was very frequent, and the relationship between them was quite consistent (harmonious). Then we inferred the training effect of the teachers in the training by combining the works or results submitted by the learners after the workshop. The error rate of these exercises or results was low, indicating that peer discussion or group discussion played an important role in the process of practice. Compared with the traditional iFIAS method, it can be found that in the training based on the project-based teaching model, learners' advanced cognitive abilities such as analysis and synthesis were developed, and their knowledge transfer ability was more flexible, which was also a reflection of interdisciplinary ability.