The effect of STEM-focused mathematics teaching on students' academic achievements, attitudes towards the course and interest in STEM-field jobs

This study aims to determine the effect of STEM-oriented mathematics teaching on the seventh graders' academic performance in the mathematics course, their attitudes towards the course, and their interest in STEM careers. The research was carried out with the participation of the seventh graders at the Ressam İbrahim Çallı Secondary School in Ankara in the 2018-2019 academic year. The research comprises two groups: an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group was subjected to a STEM-oriented mathematics teaching while the control group was subjected to a traditional teaching method. The experimental group consisted of 31 students while the control group consisted of 30 students. The applications were carried out in the learning area of "Algebra" and the sub-learning area of "Algebraic Expressions" in the mathematics course. In the study, a quasi-experimental research design, one of the experimental designs used to determine cause and effect relationships between variables, was used with a pretest-posttest control group. The data of the study were collected using an achievement test, mathematics course attitude scale, and the STEM career interest survey (STEM-CIS). The achievement test, which was developed by the researcher, consisted of 33 questions. The average difficulty index of the achievement test was found to be.46, and its KR-20 reliability coefficient was found to be .85. Algebra achievement test was applied to both experimental and control groups as pretest and posttest. The Scale of Attitudes Towards Mathematics developed by Önal (2013) was used to determine the students' attitudes towards the mathematics course. The scale is a five-point Likert-type scale that consists of 35 items and four sub-dimensions: interest, anxiety, studying, and necessity. On the other hand, the STEM Career Interest Survey, which was adapted into Turkish by Ünlü et al. (2016), was used to determine the students' interest in STEM careers. This scale is a five-point Likert-type scale that consists of 40 items. It consists of the following four sub-dimensions with 10 items each: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. SPSS 20.0 statistical package was used in the analysis of the data. The Shapiro-Wilk test, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and the Mann-Whitney U test were used to analyze the quantitative data. According to the results of the research, no statistically significant difference was found between the mean pretest-posttest scores of the achievement test applied to both the experimental group, which was subjected to STEM-oriented mathematics teaching method, and the control group, which was subjected to the traditional teaching method. According to the results of the tests performed, there was no statistically significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the Scale of Attitudes Towards Mathematics of the experimental group and the control group. A statistically significant difference in favor of the control group was found between the experimental and control groups' posttest attitude scores regarding the "studying" sub-dimension of the Scale of Attitude Towards Mathematics. Although no significant difference was found between the groups in terms of the interest, studying, and necessity sub-dimensions, and the entire scale, a significant difference in the anxiety sub-dimension was found in favor of the experimental group. Considering the STEM career interests of the experimental group and control group, a significant difference was found between the posttest scores in favor of the experimental group. On the other hand, considering the engineering sub-dimension of the scale, a significant difference was found in favor of the pre-test scores of control group.