Primary school students views about science, technology and engineering

Abstract

Some of the main goals of science education are to increase students" knowledge about the technology and engineering design process, and to train students as scientifically and technologically literate individuals. The main purpose of this study is to find out primary students" views about science, technology and engineering. For this aim and in order to increase students" knowledge and understanding of science, technology and engineering, a module named "Engineering and Technology Lessons for Children" developed by the Museum of Science was applied to 88 students who were in 4, 5 and 6th grades. The science topic was "balance and forces", and the engineering field was "civil engineering". The module took five days and consisted of interactive teaching techniques such as experiments, science trips, observations, creative drama and designing. Out of these 88, 23 students took part in interviews to find out their views about science, technology, and engineering in detail. The students were attending a comprehensive primary school in an urban district of Izmir, which is the third biggest city in Turkey. Specifically, this school was chosen since it was a sister school to the university which means the university and the school had an agreement on benefiting from each other"s competences and facilities. Since the school was a sister school it was a convenience sample and this was the main reason for choosing these students. This study is a case study survey type of research and is also a simple descriptive design. As an instrument, a semi-structured interview was used. According to the results of the analysis of the data, after implementing the module, students" awareness in terms of science, technology and engineering increased.

Elementary Teachers’ Perceptions of Engineering and Engineering Design

“…Studies employing the Draw-an-Engineer (DAE) instrument (Knight& Cunningham, 2004) highlight the stereotypical misconceptions that children hold about engineering. Children often perceive engineers as people who build and fix things and are much more likely to create drawings of white, male engineers who are working alone than drawings of women, minorities, or people working in groups (Pekmez, 2018;Newley, Kaya, Yesilyurt, & Deniz, 2017;Hammack and High, 2014;Karatas, Micklos, & Bodner, 2011;Fralick, Kearn, Thompson, & Lyons, 2009).…”

Exploring the impacts of contextualised outdoor science education on learning: the case of primary school students learning about ecosystem relationships

“…We conducted interviews because these allow students to better express a deeper level of their conceptual understanding of science than writing instruments (Kilinc et al 2013;Tomas and Ritchie 2015). This is especially true for elementary school students who generally have greater difficulty expressing themselves in writing than orally (Angeloudi, Papageorgiou, and Markos 2018;Pekmez 2018). We opted for individual interviews because we wanted to understand the impacts of learning about living organisms for each student without peer influence during data collection.…”

Elementary Teachers’ Mental Images of Engineers at Work

“…Individuals' drawings have long been used as a form of assessment of mental images ranging from the Draw-A-Man test (Goodenough, 1926) to the Draw-A-Scientist test (Chambers, 1983;Mason et al, 1991) and, more recently, the Draw-An-Engineer test (DAET) (Knight & Cunningham, 2004). Studies using DAET highlight stereotypical misconceptions that children hold of engineers, such as people who build and fix things, as well as the tendency to include images of white, male engineers who are working alone more often than drawings of women, minorities, or people working in groups (Capobianco et al, 2011;Fralick et al, 2009;Karatas et al, 2011;Newley et al, 2017;Pekmez, 2018). In a study of middle school girls who had participated in an after-school engineering mentoring program, Hammack and High (2014) found that participants were more likely to draw female engineers.…”