The effects of the effectiveness of students on academic success and attitude according to the light breaking and root approach to the lens unit

STEM approach is an important and current philosophy that using the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics with a transdisciplinary understanding. This approach aims to investigate products and projects that can provide solutions to problems in daily life by using 21st-century skills. In the present study, it was aimed to analyze the effects of STEM activities performed as Project-based on both the academic achievements of 7th-grade students and the effects on their attitudes of Science course activities. The study was applied in the spring semester of the 2018 - 2019 academic year. The study was applied to seventh-grade students selected by random methods in a primary school in Malatya. This study was done by using pretest-posttest and control group quasi-experimental design, which are quantitative research methods. In this study, "The Science Achievement Test" which is provided by researchers who are experts in their fields and "The Science Attitude Scale" developed by Ilgaz (2006) are used. During the study, traditional training was applied to the participants in the experimental group with the curriculum of the Ministry of National Education. In the last three weeks of this training, project-based STEM training activities, which were prepared in line with the unit gains of the Ministry of National Education, were implemented. In the research, the training of the participants in the control group was carried out with traditional training only in accordance with the curriculum of the Ministry of National Education during the unit process. The implementation of the project-based STEM training activities at the end of the traditional training method lasted for 4 weeks and was carried out together as a practice by the instructor and the researcher. The quantitative data obtained as a result of the applications in the research were analyzed with the statistical outputs in the SPSS package program. The pretest-posttests data obtained from the experimental and control groups in the study were evaluated at the 0.05 significance level. In order to determine the significance of this difference, a t-test analysis was performed for the dependent and independent samples on the collected data. As a result of the data obtained in this study, it was seen that the academic achievement and science attitudes of the experimental group participants who were trained with project-based STEM activities differed significantly from the control group participants who were educated with traditional methods. In addition, this significant difference as statistically was found to be in favor of the experimental group. Key Words: STEM Education, Project-Based Education, Robotics, Micro Controller System, Attitude