Eric.ed.gov – The Impact of STEM Project Writing Education on Candidate Female Teachers’ Attitudes, Their Semantic Perceptions and Project Writing Skills towards Stem Education

This research investigated the impact of Scientix STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) on female candidate teachers’ attitudes towards STEM education, their semantic perceptions of STEM discipline scopes, specifying their needs in writing STEM projects, their learning outcomes from education, and the difficulties they face in the process of project writing. Prior to the education process, the participants were given a STEM educational attitude scale, a STEM semantic contrast scale, and a questionnaire with open-ended questions to make them understand the semantic background. At the end of the training, they were given a STEM education evaluation questionnaire with open-ended questions and the same scales were used. The contents of the projects they wrote were evaluated. In the end, a meaningful difference was observed in the attitudes of female teachers towards STEM education. As for STEM semantic discrepencies, a meaningful difference was observed only in the sub-dimension of technology. Although the female candidate teachers had not received any education in project writing before (72.72%), they seemed higly confident of themselves in writing STEM projects (87.87%). The results of the content analysis showed that female teachers’ learning outcomes from STEM project development were in the themes of knowledge, skills, professional and individual development, awareness, and affective development contributing to the skills of the 22nd century. The difficulties they faced during developing projects were specifying project topics/problems, budget calculations, writing reports, forming a time schedule, overviewing literature and drawing prototype product. According to the document analysis of project reports, problems arise from project expenses and calculations of budget, advertisement activities, specifying project output and writing, and formation of job and time table. This research is considered to be important with the expectation that it will enlighten female candidate teachers who are expected to be role models in their education in preparing STEM projects in the future.