Abstract
Today’s life requires individuals to be prepared for complex world environment, to make complex decisions, and to have critical thinking skills related to everyday life issues at hand. STEM education is thought to be the glorious solution to thrive in a global knowledge driven world. Teachers are key elements for successful STEM education. Present study aims to investigate the preservice primary school, mathematics and science teachers STEM awareness. Quantitative research methodology guided the present study. Cross-sectional survey type which collects information from a sample that has been selected from a predetermined population was used. Stem Awareness Scale, a five point Likert type instrument developed by Buyruk and Korkmaz (2016), was used to measure preservice teachers STEM awareness. Data was collected from 558 (371 female, 187 male) preservice teachers enrolled in three different teacher preparation programs. The results of this research demonstrates that there is no significant interaction effect for gender and department variables however there is significant difference among different department students STEM awareness preservice science teachers’ and preservice primary school teachers STEM awareness scores have similar mean values and also outnumbers the preservice mathematics teachers’ STEM awareness.
Highlights
Today’s life requires individuals to be prepared for complex world environment, to make complex decisions, and to have critical thinking skills related to everyday life issues at hand (Kennedy and Odell, 2014)
Since education to be given in the fields of science, mathematics and technology is important for training qualified individuals, the related curricula should not be isolated from daily life (National Research Council [NRC], 2012)
It was found that science and primary school preservice teachers’ STEM awareness were higher than preservice mathematics teachers
Summary
Today’s life requires individuals to be prepared for complex world environment, to make complex decisions, and to have critical thinking skills related to everyday life issues at hand (Kennedy and Odell, 2014). When the related literature is examined, it is seen that STEM teachers do not have the necessary interdisciplinary training on (Stinson, Harkness, Meyer and Stallworth, 2009); that it is important to recognize the importance of engineering education in an early years like elementary school and secondary school levels (Kimmel, Carpinelli and Rockland, 2007); that it is necessary to develop students’ STEM skills at early ages (Robinson, Dailey, Hughes and Cotabish, 2014); and that the number of studies and attempts regarding STEM education should be increased at education faculties to train more qualified teachers and preservice teachers, who are all practitioners of STEM (Akaygün and Aslan-Tutak, 2016) In this respect, as science, mathematics and primary school preservice teachers will start teaching professionally in future, it is fairly important to determine this problem during individuals’ university education. 3) Are there any differences among preservice primary school, mathematics and science teachers’ STEM awareness with respect to grade level?
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