Development of a teaching module for pressure with STEM approach and investigation of its applicability

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of a teaching module developed with the STEM approach in the teaching of the pressure subject in the 7th-grade curriculum to the academic achievements of students, their attitudes towards science and STEM, and their opinions. The study was carried out in embedded design from mixed method research designs. While in the quantitative dimension of the research, pre-test, post-test control group semi-experimental design was used; in the qualitative dimension of the research, phenomenology was used. The sample of the research consists of 33 students who are studying in a village school connected to a metropolitan in the Fall semester of the 2017-2018 academic year. While the STEM-based teaching module was applied to the experimental group during the teaching of the pressure topic, the methods included in the curriculum were used in the control group. While quantitative data of the study were collected by academic achievement test, attitude towards science scale and attitude towards STEM scale; qualitative data of the study were obtained by semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The data obtained with quantitative data collection tools were analyzed by transferring them to SPSS 22.0 and LISREL 8.80 package program. Qualitative data also were analyzed by content analysis and descriptive analysis. In the result of this research, in terms of academic achievement, attitude toward science, and attitude toward the STEM; in favor of the experimental group, there was a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group. The content analysis of qualitative data has reached to 5 themes and 26 codes, including emotions and thoughts, positive aspects, experienced problems, skills and features acquired by the learning process. The codes and themes reveal the causes of the increase in the level of success and attitude of the experiment group. The results of the study indicate that the STEM-based teaching module has a positive influence on students' academic achievement, attitudes towards science and STEM, and their opinions.