Attitudes of the Students Attending Out-of-School STEM Workshops towards STEM Education

In this study, the attitudes of students toward STEM education were examined according to various demographic characteristics and mixed research method was used. 170 students ranging between 7 and 14 years old participating municipalities in a province outside of school STEM workshops in Turkey constituted the sample of the study. The sampling was determined by non-random sampling method. Data were collected by STEM Attitude Scale adapted to Turkish by Yildirim and Selvi (2015) and semi-structured interviews with students were conducted in order to get the opinions of the students in detail. Results indicated that out-of-school STEM workshops improve students' attitudes towards STEM. In addition, STEM attitude scores of the students did not differ by gender. It was also investigated whether the scores of the students from STEM attitude scale differ according to mother and father education level. There was only significant difference in engineering sub-dimension of the STEM attitude scale in terms of mother education status. On the other hand, it was determined that STEM attitude scale scores of the students did not differ according to father education status. Semi-structured interviews showed that students had lack of knowledge about STEM education and, also concluded that the achievement of a concrete result for children learning by doing affects their attitudes positively.