An examination of primary school 4th grade students' career interests in STEM fields and primary school teachers' self-efficacy towards STEM education

Today, in line with the developments in technology and science, the important business lines of the future are changing. In line with these changes, the most important point to be examined in order not to fall behind in the field of technology and science is how future generations will be raised in accordance with the professions in the field of technology and science and what their career preferences will be for these fields. For this reason, it is critical to determine the variables affecting the career interests of primary school students, which form the basis of academic education, towards STEM fields and to determine the self-efficacy of classroom teachers towards STEM education. For this reason, the study was conducted to examine the effect of different variables on the career interests of 4th grade primary school students towards STEM fields and the self-efficacy of classroom teachers towards STEM education. Survey model, one of the quantitative research methods, was used in the study. The restricted population of this research consists of classroom teachers working in public primary schools in Antalya Province and 4th grade students studying in these primary schools. The sample of the study consisted of 94 classroom teachers and 453 students studying in primary schools in Muratpaşa District of Antalya Province in the 2022-2023 academic year. "STEM Career Interest Scale" adapted into Turkish by Yerdelen, Kahraman, and Taş (2016) and 'STEM Applications Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale' developed by Özdemir, Yaman and Akar Vural (2018) were used to collect the research data. As a result of the analysis of the collected data, it was determined that the data were normally distributed. Therefore, Independent Sample t-Test, One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Scheffe Test were used to find out which group the significant difference between the groups was for. At the end of the study, it was determined that students' career interest in STEM fields did not differ significantly according to gender, family income, parental education level and computer ownership variables. It was determined that the self-efficacy of classroom teachers towards STEM education did not differ significantly according to the variables of gender and years of seniority. In addition to this situation, a significant difference was found in favor of teachers who received STEM education according to the variable of having received STEM education before.