Developing computational thinking skills of primary school students through integrated STEM education

This research aims to examine the effect of integrated STEM education designed according to the 5E teaching model on primary school students' computational thinking skills, STEM attitudes, and STEM motivations. For this purpose, answers to the following questions were sought in the study: What is the effect of integrated STEM education designed according to the 5E instructional model on the computational thinking skills, STEM attitudes, and STEM motivations of primary school students? 28 primary school students participated in the research in the fall semester of the 2022-2023 academic year. This research was designed using a single-group pretest-posttest weak experimental design. In this design, the effect of the procedure is tested with a study on a single group. "Computational Thinking Skill Scale" developed by Korkmaz, Çakır, and Özden (2015) was used as a pre-test and post-test in data collection; "STEM Attitude Scale" developed by Güzey, Harwell, and Moore (2014) and adapted into Turkish by Aydın, Saka, and Güzey (2017) and "STEM Motivation Scale" developed by Luo, Wang, Liu, and Zhou (2019) and adapted into Turkish by Dönmez (2020) was used. Since there is no measurement tool to measure computational thinking skills and STEM motivations developed for the primary school level, a validation study of the 22-item "Computational Thinking Skills Scale" and 28-item "STEM Motivation Scale" for the primary school level was conducted. Based on the 5E instructional model 10-week integrated STEM education was designed and implemented. At the beginning and end of the education process, the above-mentioned scales were used as pre-test and post-test. Descriptive statistics and Wilcoxen signed-rank tests were used to analyze the obtained data. The study's findings show that integrated STEM education designed according to the 5E instructional model significantly affected the computational thinking skills of primary school students. In this study, in terms of sub-factors of computational thinking skills, a significant difference was found between students' pre-test and post-test in creativity, algorithmic thinking, critical thinking, and problem-solving sub-factors. This difference is in favor of the post-test. However, it was found that integrated STEM education designed according to the 5E instructional model significantly affected the STEM attitudes of primary school students. Finally, it was found that integrated STEM education significantly affects the STEM motivation of primary school students. At the same time, when the four sub-factors of the STEM motivation scale were examined, a significant difference was found in favor of the post-test in the technology, engineering, and mathematics factors, excluding the science factor. Keywords: Integrated STEM education, 5E instructional model, Computational thinking skills, STEM attitude, STEM motivation, primary school students