The effect of STEM activities on bilingual students' critical thinking skills

Educational models are evolving to meet the demands of today's fast-paced, technology-driven world. This study focuses on STEM, an interdisciplinary and innovative educational model that can cater to the multilingual, multicultural, and dynamic nature of today's society. The aim is to assess the impact of STEM activities on the critical thinking skills of bilingual students. The study utilized a quasi-experimental design with a pretest-posttest control group, a quantitative research approach. Research data was gathered using Critical Thinking Scales. The study involved two groups of 4th grade primary school students, fluent in Kurdish and Turkish. The experimental group comprised 10 students, and the control group comprised 9. In the study, both the experimental and control groups of students were initially assessed using Critical Thinking Scales. Following this, the control group underwent a 5-week period, during which they followed the MoNE curriculum for science courses and were then given a post-test. In the experimental group, the post-test was administered after completing 5 activities: STEM Tower, STEM Spacecraft, STEM Bridge, STEM Jacketing, and STEM Catapult. In the study, although we observed a statistically significant difference in favor of the experimental group in the average scores of STEM activities with bilingual students in the areas of analysis, evaluation, inference, interpretation, and self-regulation from the critical thinking skill areas, no statistically significant difference was found. Another important result from the research is that when we compared the pre-test and post-test scores of the students, we determined a significant difference in the experimental group.