The influence of an engineering design based instruction on 6th grade students' STEM career interest and 21st century skills

The purpose of this research is to examine the influence of engineering design based instruction on 6th-grade students' STEM career interests and 21st-century skills. The research was conducted using non-equivalent control group quasi-experimental design, which is one of the quantitative research designs. The research sample was selected from a public school which is in Afyonkarahisar, Merkez, using convenience sampling, a non-random sampling method. A total of 72 students participated in the research, with 34 in the control group and 38 in the experimental group. In the control group, curriculum-based instruction was implemented for the "System in Our Body" unit, while in the experimental group, the same unit was taught using engineering design based instruction. The implementation process of the research lasted for 6 weeks, totaling 18 hours. STEM Career Interest Survey and 21st Century Skills Scale, which were used as data collection tools in the research, were administered to experimental and control groups as pre-tests and post-tests. Statistical analyses were conducted to examine the influence of engineering design based instruction on students' interests in STEM careers and 21st-century skills. According to the results obtained from the data analysis, there was no statistically significant difference between the experimental and control group in terms of the differential scores they obtained from the STEM Career Interest Scale and its subscales. However, it was determined that engineering design based instruction had a statistically significant and positive effect on increasing the students' interests in the experimental group towards STEM careers. On the other hand, it was found that engineering design based instruction did not have a statistically significant effect on students' 21st-century skills. The research results are discussed in detail and recommendations are provided for future studies, practitioners, and teachers.