Research synthesis of STEM Education effected on science process skills in Thailand

Abstract

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics integrated to be an educational management approach. It also enhances students’ thirteen science process skills including observing, classifying, measuring, using numbers, using space/time relationship, inferring, predicting, communicating, identifying and controlling variables, defining variables operationally, formulating hypotheses, experimenting, interpreting data and drawing conclusion. These are divided into two groups: basic process skills consisting of the first eight processes and integrated process skills consisting of the last five processes. Nowadays, there are plenty of studies concerning the STEM Education effected on students’ science achievements in Thailand but not many focusing on science process skills. Therefore, the objective of this research is to synthesize the STEM Education effected on Thai students’ science process skills. The variables consist of two sets which are the description of research, and the effect sizes of research. The tool for collecting data is the recording data form for research synthesis. Data were analysed by frequency, percentage and meta-analysis. The results showed that 1) the description of research found that from 2010 until 2019 research referring to students’ science process skills on STEM Education published ten reports, mostly in 2016 and 2018 (40%), Maha Sarakham University and Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University equally usually produced the research referring to the students’ science process skills on STEM Education (30%), most researchers from the Office of the Basic Education Organization produced the research (90%), most were female researchers (80%), the research type was thesis in master degree (100%), the objective commonly found was to compare (44%), most of the research design found was in experimental design using One Group Pretest - Posttest Design (80%), always found sampling methods using cluster random samplings (50%), sample found mainly was students (100%), samples’ research level was equally both lower and upper secondary (50%),used largely in science (50%) and repeated analyzing method found was descriptive statistics (27.02%), and most of the science process skills were integrated skills (60%). 2) The effect sizes (d) of STEM Education effected on students’ science process skills was 1.69. The Standard Deviation (Sd) was 1.99. This means that the STEM Education can influence students’ science process skills.