People need to be qualified to adapt to innovations caused by the rapid change in information and technology. This would be realized with the integration of technology into education. In order to subsist in the world of science and technology the disciplines with an important role both now and in the future are science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In this regard, the number of studies conducted on the improvement of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education is also increasing day by day. In this study information is given about the studies conducted on STEM and a total of 40 academic studies consisting of articles and papers published in national and international journals are discussed. Within this scope, studies conducted on the subject matter according to the results of the content analysis are investigated. Research approaches, research methods, learning environments, learning outcomes, data collection tools, research samples, STEM subjects of these studies and body of literature are evaluated. Data collected from the studies are analyzed with methods of descriptive statistics. Results are presented as frequencies and percentage tables. As a result of the study it stands out that qualitative researches are preferred more in STEM education studies, experimental studies and surveys are used as research methods and studies are conducted mostly with primary school students. It is considered that this study would be helpful to researchers eager to study on the subject.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of teaching technologies and material development course taught through Moodle based online argumentation implementation on critical thinking disposition of third year science teacher candidates. The study was carried out with a total of 43 students consisting of an experimental group of 22 and a control group of 21 students studying at the Department of Science Education at a State University Faculty of Education in the fall term of 2014-15 academic years. Sequential explanatory design was used as a mixed method strategy in this research. A quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test non-equivalent control group design was used in the quantitative part of the study. A case study research design was used in the qualitative part of the study. California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory was used as data collection tool. In addition, an open-ended interview questions form was used to define opinions of science teacher candidates about the method applied in the course. Independent samples t-test and paired samples t-test were used in the analysis of quantitative data. Descriptive analysis was used to analyse qualitative data. At the end of the research, while a statistically significant difference in critical thinking dispositions of teacher candidates was observed in favour of post-test results of the experimental group, no statistically significant difference was observed in the control group. When the opinions of teacher candidates on the subject were investigated, it was found that the teacher candidates strongly supported the elimination of internet connection problems to improve the course.

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One of the most important goals in E-learning is to guarantee that participants reach the learning objectives. We have observed that having the knowledge of the subject is not sufficient for reaching learning objectives. The participants must also develop understanding that they know the subject, which we have named confidence. In this work, we have demonstrated that it is possible to assess both knowledge and confidence using only two different types of multiple-choice test questions. We have developed 1) a method to design questions to identify both knowledge and confidence and 2) a method to estimate actual knowledge and confidence from answers. We have evaluated our method using Monte-Carlo simulations. Our simulations demonstrated that it is always possible to obtain reliable estimations for knowledge and confidence using approximately 100 multiple choice test questions in a given subject.   Keywords: E-learning, assessment, shape modeling, immersions, 3D-thickenings, shape algebra.