The effect of STEM activities on 5th grade students' problem-solving skills and decision-making skills

With the rapid development in technology and innovation fields in today's world, gaining 21st-century skills has begun to take its part among the priorities and objectives of the science curriculum of countries. In this study, activities based on STEM education were carried out in the science lessons of secondary school 5th-grade students, and the effect of this process on the development of students' problem-solving skills and decision-making skills was examined. The study group of this research consists of 40 5th-grade students, one in the experimental (N=20) and the other in the control group (N=20), of a private secondary school in Kocaeli in the 2017-2018 academic year. The research is a mixed-method study in which quantitative and qualitative methods are used together. The design of research was carried out with the embedded mixed design method. The quantitative study group of the research was determined by the purposive sampling method. The qualitative study group was carried out with 10 students selected from the experimental group. The Problem-Solving Skill Test and Decision-Making Skill Test developed by the researcher for quantitative data were used as data collection tools in the study, which lasted 33 course hours in 8 weeks. For qualitative data, STEM activity course documents, semi-structured interview forms, and student diaries were used. Quantitative data analysis of the research was carried out with the SPSS 22.0 package program. The "Two-Factor ANOVA for Mixed Measures" analysis technique was used in the analysis of quantitative data. In the analysis of qualitative data, descriptive analysis and content analysis techniques were used. As a result of the quantitative data analysis of the research, it was concluded that STEM activities were effective in improving the problem-solving skills of 5th-grade students. In the analysis of decision-making skill tests, it was determined that STEM activities were not sufficient to affect the decision-making skills of 5th-grade students. In the analysis of the qualitative data of the research, as a result of the analyzes made on the STEM course activity documents, it was seen that the problem-solving skills and decision-making skills of the 5th-grade students did not develop continuously, sometimes there were positive developments, sometimes they remained the same, or there was decline. As a result of semi-structured interviews about the effect of STEM activities on students' problem-solving skills and decision-making skills, positive opinions of students on problem-solving skills and decision-making skills were determined. While it was analyzed that STEM activities reflected positively on the development of problem-solving skills in student diaries, it was determined that STEM activities had difficulties in expressing the concepts of students' decision-making skills in a cause-effect relationship. Based on the results obtained from the research findings, it can be deduced that a longer time is needed for the positive development of problem-solving and decision-making skills.