The effect of STEM education on the entrepreneurial skills of primary school fourth grade students

In the world that changes and develops day by day, it is expected from individuals to acquire 21st century skills. One of these skills is entrepreneurship skill. Although it is not clear how entrepreneurship education will be implemented in schools, it is recommended to be given with the help of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. In order to improve the entrepreneurship skills of the students at the primary school level, STEM education is carried out. However, it is also necessary to investigate to what extent this education increases the entrepreneurship skills of primary school students. When the literature is examined, it is seen that there is no data collection tool for measuring the entrepreneurship skills of primary school students. In this context, one of the aims of the study is to develop a data collection tool to measure the entrepreneurship skills of primary school students, and the second aim is to examine the effect of STEM education on fourth grade students' entrepreneurial skills. In the scale development part of the study, firstly, the variable to be measured was defined and its theoretical structure was revealed in detail. Then, the stages of creating an item pool, reviewing the items by experts, ensuring item validity, piloting the scale, evaluating the items with exploratory factor analysis, finalizing the scale, performing the main application, and evaluating the items with confirmatory factor analysis were carried out. At the end of the study, the "Entrepreneurship Scale for Fourth Grade Students" was obtained, with a Cronbach Alpha reliability value of 0.82, consisting of 39 items explaining 56.26 of the total variance and 7 sub-dimensions. In the second part of the study, in order to examine the effect of STEM education on the entrepreneurship skills of fourth grade students, a parallel pattern converging from mixed method designs was used. The study group was selected with an easily accessible method and consists of 30 fourth grade students in a state school in Çankaya district of Ankara province in the 2019-2020 academic year. In the research process, quantitative and qualitative data were collected separately in accordance with the convergent parallel pattern and interpreted together. In the research, the "Entrepreneurship Scale for Fourth Grade Students" developed by the researchers as a quantitative data collection tool was used as a pre-test and a post-test. As qualitative data collection tools, "STEM Education and Entrepreneurship Skills Semi-Structured Interview Form", "STEM Education and Entrepreneurship Skills Observation Form", researcher diary and Engineering Design Process Form were used. The applications in this study were carried out in the science course and continued for nine weeks. During this process, students performed five STEM activities (We Make Telescopes, Food Cart, We Make Products from Useful and Harmful Foods, Whose Hand is Strong? and Magnet Train). Parametric tests were used in the analysis of quantitative data. Entrepreneurship Scale pre-test mean scores (x̄ = 83.96; ss=8,89) and post-test mean scores (x̄ = 97.65; ss=10,59) of the students in the study group were compared with dependent groups t-test and a statistically significant difference was found in favor of the post-test (p <0.05). and effect size value (Cohen's d: 1.40). In the study, the differences between the pre and post test average scores for the 7 sub-dimensions of the Entrepreneurship Scale and the effect size values were calculated. High impact on STEM education's sub-dimensions of risk taking (Cohen's d: 1.53), need for success (Cohen's d: 1.45) and effective communication (Cohen's d: 1.47); medium effect on leadership (Cohen's d: 0.70), innovativeness (Cohen's d: 0.72) and teamwork (Cohen's d: 0.56) sub dimensions; In the self-control (sub-dimension, it was concluded that there was no significant difference between pre-test and post-test scores. The data obtained from qualitative data collection tools were subjected to content analysis. In the content analysis, codes were created from the data obtained through interviews, observations or documents, and categories were determined based on the discovered codes. The codes obtained from the qualitative data are divided into two categories as positive and negative. Based on this result, it can be said that STEM education positively affects all 7 sub-dimensions of entrepreneurship skills in general. In this study, two researchers also observed the students in the process and filled the observation forms belonging to the groups in terms of the sub-dimensions of "STEM activities, entrepreneurship skills, classroom order and student participation, activity structure". As a result, all groups made a transition from medium (25-50 points) to high (50-75 points) in the five activity processes. The findings obtained were supported by the opinions of the students. Similarly, the scores obtained from the Engineering Design Process Form support the progress of the groups. As a result of the research, it can be recommended to use STEM education to improve the entrepreneurship skills of primary school students.