Investigation of some factors explaining the attitudes of seventh grade secondary school students against STEM areas

The aim of this study is to investigate some factors that explain the school success of the students in the seventh grade in the field of STEM. These factors are: Constructivist learning environments, multiple intelligences and attitudes towards STEM. The research was conducted in the spring semester of 2018-2019 academic year. The sample of the study is consisted of 593 seventh grade students attending 10 secondary schools in Kayapınar district of Diyarbakır. The scales used in the research are Constructivist Learning Environment Scale, Multiple Intelligence Scale and Attitude towards STEM Scale. The model used in the research is the causal comparative research which is preferred in explaining the cause and effect relationships. SPSS 21 was used for descriptive statistics analysis. In order to test the hypothesis model of the study, Lavaan package installed in Rstudio was used for structural equation modelling. As a result of the analyses, STEM achievements were explained by constructivist learning environment with medium level. The constructivist learning environment explained the STEM attitudes with a large effect size. On the other hand, the attitude towards STEM explained the achievements in STEM fields with a small effect size. The relationship between multiple intelligences and STEM field achievements was not statistically significant with 0.08 coefficient. The two-way relationship between the constructivist learning environment and multiple intelligences was found to be significant with over than medium effect size. When the results of the study were examined, it was seen that multiple intelligences and attitude towards STEM were significantly lower in explaining achievement while constructivist learning environment had a significant effect on explaining STEM achievements, attitude to STEM and multiple intelligences.