Awareness Levels and Attitudes Of Primary School Teachers About STEM Approach

Abstract

The aim of this study is to determine the primary school teacher' awareness levels and attitudes towards STEM education and to determine the relationship between them. It was tried to determine whether the gender and professional seniority years of primary school teacher affect their awareness and attitudes towards STEM education. The research is in a survey model and the participants were determined by simple random sampling method. The research population consists of 401 primary school teachers working in the Sinop in the 2019-2020 academic year. The scale was sent to all of the primary school teachers, 203 of them returned. The appropriately filled 190 scales were evaluated. STEM Awareness Scale (STEM) developed by Buyruk and Korkmaz (2016) and STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics) Education Attitude Scale developed by Derin et al. (2017) were used in the study. The data were analyzed in SPSS 22 program. In the analysis of data; arithmetic mean, standard deviation, ANOVA test, t-test, correlation analysis statistical techniques were used. It was determined that the STEM education awareness level of primary school teachers was at the level of "I agree" and their attitude towards STEM education was at the level of "I am undecided". There was no significant relationship between the level of awareness and attitudes of primary school teachers towards STEM education and the gender variable. However, there is a significant relationship between the professional seniority of primary school teachers and their STEM awareness and attitude levels. It has been determined that there is a positive relationship between primary school teacher' awareness levels and attitudes towards STEM education. It was observed that as the level of awareness of primary school teacher towards STEM education increased, the level of significance among the attitude sub-dimensions increased, but their attitudes towards the feasibility sub-dimension.