Effects of STEM Based Activities on In-Service Teachers’ Views

In this study we investigated the effect of STEM based activities on in-service teachers’ views about STEM teaching. Pre-test and post-test research design was employed to investigate teachers’ reactions to STEM based activities. The participants were 39 in-service teachers from different majors who were working as teachers in public schools in Turkey. The teachers attended a 40-hour STEM training course in which STEM based activities were performed. “Pre-service Teachers’ Integrative STEM Teaching Intention Questionnaire” was used to measure teachers' views on STEM teaching. The results showed that STEM based activies had a positive effect on teachers’ views about STEM education.


Introduction
In recent years interdisciplinary teaching has gained increasing importance in the field of education (Jones, 2009). Because disciplinary-based teaching brought along a big problem, it caused students to think "Teachers teaching us only academic information, and these are not necessary for me to learn about how to live in real life." Education is more meaningful and valuable to students when it reflects real life rather than teaching the curriculum in subjects (Antov & Pancheva, 2016). Therefore, as time has changed, the way we teach must be changed. The role of the school should not only teach learning and academic performance but also prepare students for life. Students should be equipped with innovative and creative thinking skills to solve problems in authentic contexts (Larson & Miller, 2011). According to Greenberg et. al. (2003), fundamental mission of school is to teach not only basic skills as reading, counting, writing, it should teach beyond these basic requirements. Today's school has to connect lessons into real life applications and clarify students how they can use the learning materials in the outside world. Teachers should enable students to see the relevance of subjects with each other. There is a general consensus among educators about the common problem in schools today is that the separate subject approach in education (Furner & Kumar, 2007). It is asserted that students' problem solving skills depends on their understandings about the context within the problem (Frykholm & Glasson, 2005). Furner and Kumar (2007, p. 186) likened separate subject curriculum as "a jigsaw puzzle without any picture". At this point, a new educational approach which defends integrated curriculum has emerged in education called STEM.

What is STEM Education?
STEM defined as acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (Bell, 2016;Dugger, 2015). But it means much more than this acronym (Ostler, 2012). STEM education aims to teach the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics as a whole (Breiner, Harkness, Johnson & Koehler, 2012). Thus, students who are taught with these integrated disciplines have ability to solve problems faced in real life. Because problems in real life are not in the form of separate disciplines as taught in lessons (Czerniak et al., 1999;Wang, Moore, Roehrig, & Park, 2011).
Since real life problems are very complex, it is impossible for discipline-based teaching to solve and define these problems (Antov & Pancheva, 2016). Bybee (2010) stated that the modern world problems as energy, health, and the environment could be solved by only integrated curricular. STEM education gives chance students to have learning experience in real world issues instead of teaching bits and pieces (Tsupros, Kohler & Hallinen, 2009) and help them to be aware of how subjects are relevant to their lives. It helps students to appreciate the value of what is taught in school (Moore, is that "How do teachers perceive "STEM" and how do they implement STEM education while teaching their subjects?". A major problem here is that the disconnection between how teachers teach STEM subjects in schools and teachers' skills and knowledge necessary for STEM education (Cuadra & Moreno, 2005). According to Srikoom, Hanuscin and Faikhamta (2017), being a STEM teacher requires special knowledge beyond being a teacher and the central role of teachers is to teach STEM activities. Several studies show that teachers are well versed in their subject matter knowledge but they lack of skills in STEM education (EL-Deghaidy, Mansour, Alzaghibi & Alhammad, 2017).
According to Wang et. al. (2011), this problem primarily depends on the lack of instructions for teachers to the use of STEM education effectively in classrooms. Srikoom, Hanuscin and Faikhamta (2017) claimed that teachers should be given guidelines on how to integrate STEM education into their classrooms. Another limiting factor is that teachers' inadequate content knowledge in other disciplines because STEM education means interaction with four disciplines. Sanders (2009) indicated that STEM education requires teachers to be expert not only in their subject but also requires them to be informed at least one other STEM subject. All of these inadequacies affect teachers' STEM implementation (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council, 2014). In this regard Kline (2005) proposed to reconstructe pre-service training and in-service training program within the scope of innovative and contemporary STEM education. On the other hand, teachers' perceptions regarding STEM is likely to be the most important factor for educators should take into consideration. Because teachers' perceptions, knowledge and beliefs affect how teachers shape their teaching practice and their decisions in the classroom (Srikoom, Hanuscin & Faikhamta, 2017). Little research exists in the field of inservice education to accurately determine the benefits of STEM education in promoting inservice teachers' views about STEM teaching (Aydın & Şahin, 2018). It is also important to examine in-service teachers as a sample group because in-service teachers are the pioneers of teaching process. Their views, perceptions, beliefs etc. on a subject will directly affect their teaching. Due to these reasons, in this study we focused on how STEM based activities will affect teachers' views about STEM education.

Aim of Research
The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of STEM based activities on teachers' views about STEM teaching. The research questions are as follows:  Do the increase in teachers' test scores differ according to teachers' gender?
 Do the increase in teachers' test scores differ according to their majors?
 Do the increase in teachers' test scores differ according to their professional seniority?

Research Model
In this study, pre-test and post-test design without control group was chosen to determine the effect of STEM based activities on teachers' views about STEM teaching. The aim of this design is to test the effectiveness of an intervention. Therefore, pre-test and post-test are used to measure the difference in participants' test score which indicates the change in the value of the dependent variable (Dimitrov & Rumrill, 2003).

Participants
A total of 39 in-service teachers from different majors who were working as teachers in public schools participated in this study. Teachers' detailed demographic information is shown in Table 1.

Research Results
Research results of the study are given below in the direction of the research questions.

Research question 1: Is there a significant difference between pre-test and post-test scores in
teachers' views about STEM teaching?
Paired sample t-test was used to determine whether there is significant difference between pretest and posttest scores. The results are shown in Table 3. The Mann Whitney U test was used to determine whether the increase in teachers' test scores differ or not according to their gender. The results are shown in Table 4.  Table 5. The Kruskal Wallis H-Test was used to determine whether the increase in teachers' test scores differs or not according to their professional seniority and results are shown in Table 6. As seen in Table 6, there was no significant difference between the groups with respect to professional seniority (p >.05). It can be said that the increase in teachers' test scores do not differ according to their professional seniority.

Conclusions and Discussion
The aim of the current study was to understand in-service teachers' perceptions about STEM education before and after receiving STEM training course. We found that STEM based activies had positive effect on teachers' views about STEM education. Gender difference is one of the most important problem in STEM education. A major concern is that reduction of girls' interest in STEM subjects over time with age, education level (UNESCO,2017). Girls positive view development regarding STEM education is desired as well as boys. The finding that motivates our study is that there is no significant difference between teachers' gender and their views on STEM teaching (

Implications and Recommendations
Several important implications and recommendations for future studies can be drawn from the findings of this study. The main finding is that STEM based activies had positive effect on teachers' views about STEM education. But this finding did not explain why teachers were affected positively by STEM education, since this study was conducted quantitatively. Therefore, we recommend for future studies to use qualitative and quantitative research methods together to gain deeper and detailed information.
A limited number of teachers participated in this in-service training. Therefore, online courses should be provided to make these trainings accessible for more teachers. An other recommendation is that teachers especially in pre-service training should be trained with full of STEM education. As proposed by Pimthong and Williams (2018), pre-service teacher education programs should aim to build teachers' content and pedagogical knowledge regarding STEM education as component of four main disciplines.
Early childhood education is important for a child so as to reveal its full potential with regard to social, emotional and physical and this is the basis for its lifelong success. For these reasons, STEM education should be started in the early years. Due to the cruical role of early childhood educators in child development, these teachers should be trained in STEM education and engage children in STEM related learning activities. In this context, early childhood teachers' or teacher candidates' understandings about STEM education can be investigated.