Investigation of the effect of STEM education applications developed for children in early childhood on scientific process skills

This study was conducted to examine the effect of STEM education practices developed by the researcher on children in early childhood on scientific process skills. The research is in the form of a quasi-experimental study. The working group of the research consists of pre-school children studying in the kindergartens of Cumhuriyet Primary School affiliated to the Ministry of National Education in the academic year 2020-2021. The study was conducted with experimental and control groups, and the study was conducted with a total of 20 children, 10 children in the experimental group and 10 children in the control group. In the research, "Preschool Period Scientific Process Skill Test" developed by Şahin, Yıldırım, Sürmeli and Güven (2018) and the "General Information Form" developed by the researcher were used as data collection tools. Before the research, a pre-test was applied to each participant in the study group after obtaining necessary permissions. STEM education applications developed by the researcher during the research process were applied to the children in the experimental group; the daily education flow specified in the 2013 Preschool Education Program was continued for the children in the control group. In the week following the end of the applications, the data obtained by applying post-tests to both groups were analyzed with the SPSS 22 program. During the analysis process, it was concluded that the data obtained showed a normal distribution by looking at the distribution of the data. For this reason, the data were analyzed through parametric tests and expert opinions were obtained from the relevant field. Independent groups T-Test to see if there is a significant difference between pre-test and post-test scores, dependent groups T-Test to see if there is a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in their pre-test and post-test scores, and obtained from the general information form. T-Test and one-way analysis of variance (One Way Anova) were used to see the effect of demographic information on scientific process skills. While there is no significant difference between the pre-test scores based on the findings obtained from the analysis; It was revealed that there is a significant difference in favor of the experimental group between the post-test scores. It was concluded that the STEM education practices developed were effective on children's scientific process skills.